Philosophy of narrative
The interdisciplinary nature of narrative study creates many lenses through which to view narrative, its nature and effects. These principles of narrative — at the intersections of biology, narrative theory, and modeling & simulation — form the foundation of this approach to communications.
Principles
Stories are useful, not true.
Stories are the language of change.
Stories are biological.
Literature is a technology.
Thought is in service to action.
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 the vehicles of possibility.
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.
Storytelling is an innate human ability: humans tell stories without being taught how to tell a story.
Nothing humankind has achieved would have been possible without literature. Full credit: Angus Fletcher, Wonderworks and Storythinking.
Thought — and stories — are in service to action, or movement.
References
Bennett, Max. A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI and the Five Breakthroughs that Made Our Brains, 2022.
Cartwright, Nancy + Robin Le Poidevin. “Fables and Models” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1991.
Fernbach, Philip + 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 + 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. + C. Edwin Harris, Jr. “The Ethics of Modelling” in Control Engineering Practice, 1997.
Trench, W. F. “Mimesis in Aristotle’s Poetics” in Hermathena, 1933.