"What got people out of the trees was something beside thumbs and gadgets. What did it, I am convinced, was a warp in the simian brain that made us insatiable for patterns – patterns of sequence, of behavior, of feeling – connections, reasons, causes: stories."
That's what Kathryn Morton contends in her essay "The Story-telling Species" (reprinted in The Philippines Free Press in 1994; originally published as "The Storytelling Animal" in The New York Times Book Review in 1985).
And Morton says that it's not just writers but also scientists that use this method of connecting one thing with another, of creating stories. She argues that this ability to see patterns in natural phenomena and social behavior allows scientists to explain, for example, planetary movements or food gathering skills. And sometimes, scientists "create stories" in the form of mathematical formulas that we take for the Truth (with a capital letter T).
Morton argues that:
"It is by narrative that we experience our lives. I would propose that so far from being nonutilitarian, as is often charged, imaginative narrative, which in its refined and printed form we call fiction, was decisive in the creation of our species, and is still essential in the development of each human individual and necessary to the maintenance of his health and pursuit of his purposes."
Morton is right to point out that while narrative is common in all disciplines, imaginative narrative or fiction (or the literary arts in general) has taken the bad rap. We don't trust as Truth the experiences and realizations characters go through in a novel. While these characters may seem as familiar as the flesh-and-blood people around us, ultimately we consider them as made-up figures when we finish the book we've been reading. And we don't really think of the "truth" we read in the novel applicable in our lives.
And so we come up with degrees of Truthfulness. We consider the disciplines under the natural sciences domain to yield Truths that are empirically observable and verifiable. To a lesser extent we look at the disciplines under the social sciences domain to provide us relative Truths. But definitely we don't consider as Truth the truths we find in the arts and humanities domain.
What we forget sometimes are the different assumptions about what we can know and how we gain knowledge about certain things. To put it simplistically, we realize that the various domains focus on what can be considered as knowable: the natural sciences examines natural phenomena, the social sciences investigates social behavior, and the arts and humanities explores human experiences. These different domains employ diverse methods to determine what is true, and discrete criteria to validate what is considered true in that domain. (And while we specialize in a specific discipline, we eventually dismiss as irrelevant and, yes, nonutilitarian things that the discipline considers outside its field of knowledge. Needless to say, the arts and humanities disciplines are always in the losing end of this practice.)
Let's try this out through an exercise:
That's what Kathryn Morton contends in her essay "The Story-telling Species" (reprinted in The Philippines Free Press in 1994; originally published as "The Storytelling Animal" in The New York Times Book Review in 1985).
And Morton says that it's not just writers but also scientists that use this method of connecting one thing with another, of creating stories. She argues that this ability to see patterns in natural phenomena and social behavior allows scientists to explain, for example, planetary movements or food gathering skills. And sometimes, scientists "create stories" in the form of mathematical formulas that we take for the Truth (with a capital letter T).
Morton argues that:
"It is by narrative that we experience our lives. I would propose that so far from being nonutilitarian, as is often charged, imaginative narrative, which in its refined and printed form we call fiction, was decisive in the creation of our species, and is still essential in the development of each human individual and necessary to the maintenance of his health and pursuit of his purposes."
Morton is right to point out that while narrative is common in all disciplines, imaginative narrative or fiction (or the literary arts in general) has taken the bad rap. We don't trust as Truth the experiences and realizations characters go through in a novel. While these characters may seem as familiar as the flesh-and-blood people around us, ultimately we consider them as made-up figures when we finish the book we've been reading. And we don't really think of the "truth" we read in the novel applicable in our lives.
And so we come up with degrees of Truthfulness. We consider the disciplines under the natural sciences domain to yield Truths that are empirically observable and verifiable. To a lesser extent we look at the disciplines under the social sciences domain to provide us relative Truths. But definitely we don't consider as Truth the truths we find in the arts and humanities domain.
What we forget sometimes are the different assumptions about what we can know and how we gain knowledge about certain things. To put it simplistically, we realize that the various domains focus on what can be considered as knowable: the natural sciences examines natural phenomena, the social sciences investigates social behavior, and the arts and humanities explores human experiences. These different domains employ diverse methods to determine what is true, and discrete criteria to validate what is considered true in that domain. (And while we specialize in a specific discipline, we eventually dismiss as irrelevant and, yes, nonutilitarian things that the discipline considers outside its field of knowledge. Needless to say, the arts and humanities disciplines are always in the losing end of this practice.)
Let's try this out through an exercise:
- Identify an issue or topic in a discipline other than your own. For example, if you're pursuing a Biology degree you may consider "love" as something outside your discipline.
- Try to determine how your discipline (Biology, for instance) would go about proving or disproving this concept.
- Write down your thoughts in a five-paragraph essay you'll call, "My Search for Truth or Truths." And submit it through email or by posting it as a comment to this blog entry.
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