Samhain \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Thanksgiving Moon<\/p>\n
Narrative fallacy. \u00a0I read about it first last night in a book on Amazon.com called “The Everything Store.” \u00a0Jeff Bezos refers to it as a construct he read in the book, “The Black Swan.” \u00a0It struck me as very post modern.<\/p>\n
Here’s how I understand it. \u00a0The narrative fallacy occurs when we use our logical, cause and effect seeking mental habits to place often chaotic events in a series that we can understand. \u00a0This means leaving out details, rearranging troublesome sequences, condensing complex interactions. \u00a0We make a story out of the data available to us.<\/p>\n
I haven’t read the Black Swan but I imagine this is how Black Swans (big problems that seem to come out of nowhere) slip under the perceptions of people trying to evaluate risks.<\/p>\n
This squares with an especially nettlesome idea in current neuroscience (the author may have gotten it from that source) that suggests our self is a narrative fallacy. \u00a0That is, our self is a story we construct out of certain pieces of our life, knitting this into the fabric and leaving that out. \u00a0In this view the self is not solid and unchanging, it’s not even relatively solid but changing slowly over time. \u00a0No, the self is fluid from beginning to end, a long long novel with ourselves in a starring role, but the script keeps getting handed to us, marked up with changes.<\/p>\n
This partly comes from the plasticity of memory and the proven unreliability of human memory. \u00a0We now know eye witnesses, once the gold standard of detective fiction and fact, are the least likely to portray events accurately. \u00a0Not because the eye witnesses lie, but because our capacity to remember events as they happened is poor. \u00a0Emotions skew them, bias skews them, our senses feed us less than reliable data. \u00a0We’re a walking hodge podge of experiences.<\/p>\n
(sarah fishburn)<\/p>\n
The narrative fallacy neatly explains the role of story. \u00a0As Bill Schmidt’s Tom Clancy quote says, “Fiction is not like reality. \u00a0Fiction has to make sense.” \u00a0A key role of fiction is to reassure us of the intelligibility of the world. \u00a0The world is not, in fact, intelligible. \u00a0There’s just too much going on. \u00a0We have to edit our experience to have any hope of using it to our advantage.<\/p>\n
Why is it post modern? \u00a0Because post modernism (I’m not convinced this is a very good term.) insists on the unreliability of any narrative. [think about this idea in relation to the photograph below of a Traditional Catholic service in Kitchener, Ontario] As a direct corollary of this, though, there is the role of agency, the role of narrative creator. \u00a0That gives all of us a key role in constructing the future we want. \u00a0We can claim neither fundamentals from so-called foundational documents or ideas, nor can we rely on history as other than story; but, we can rely on the necessity of our role in creating a new story, one constructed in a way that seems to us true, just and fair. \u00a0Even beautiful. \u00a0Knowing that none of these categories are more than markers for working or not working.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Samhain \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Thanksgiving Moon Narrative fallacy. \u00a0I read about it first last night in a book on Amazon.com called “The Everything Store.” \u00a0Jeff Bezos refers to … Continue reading The Narrative Fallacy<\/span>