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…
