I. Our Mysterious Love of Stories
People like stories, especially children. The bestseller lists are regularly dominated by fiction. There is something puzzling about this: these are, in a sense, books full of lies. None of what they say is true, and we know that up front. We read them for fun, not education. But why are we made such that we would enjoy consuming long accounts of events that never happened?
The byproduct theory
Maybe our love of stories is just a byproduct of other general capacities, like our capacities for emotion, empathy, and imagination. We imagine a series of events, then we empathize with the characters in them, and so we feel emotional reactions (or perhaps pseudo-emotions) about them, and that is entertaining. The kinds of stories a person enjoys are determined by the kinds of emotions they prefer. For instance, people who like feeling amazed will prefer science fiction and fantasy stories. (The first science fiction magazine was called Amazing Stories.)
No doubt this is a key part of the story of why we like stories. But I think there is more.
The educational theory
Maybe we like stories because we learn from them. Although the events portrayed are not real, they are usually realistic, at least in certain key respects. Even if the story features dragons or alien robots, the characters will generally be (at least if the author is skilled) psychologically realistic. What we have to gain is not knowledge of the specific events related, but an improved sense of what people are like, and of what life is like. You can especially see how children would learn from this, because they know so little to begin with. They need to learn about human motives, attitudes, and behaviors.
This may also be why people like gossip, but stories have more of the educational element and less of the malicious or envious element.
You could try telling people what people are like, in a series of explicit propositions. But this is much less compelling. Suppose you tell your child:
“If you find out that someone is very immoral in one respect, you should not trust that person, and you should be prepared for them to stab you in the back as soon as it is in their interests to do so.”
Stated in that way, I don’t think the child would fully appreciate the point. But now here’s a brief story:
“Queen Cersei Lannister was married to King Robert Baratheon. One of Robert’s lords, Ned Stark, discovered evidence that Cersei’s son, Prince Joffrey, was not genetically descended from Robert but was the product of Cersei’s adultery. Ned felt duty-bound to report this to the King. However, he knew that Robert would kill Cersei as soon as he found out. So to show mercy, Ned first warned Cersei that he was going to tell the King what he knew, so that she could get out of town before the King found out.
“Instead, Cersei immediately contrived to assassinate the King before Ned had a chance to talk to him. She then framed Ned Stark for treason. Ned wound up being executed, and Cersei took control of the realm.”
That is more compelling and more understandable than the abstract proposition. Perhaps this is why we tell each other stories.
Story vs. history
Instead of telling children fictional stories, what if we just taught them a lot of history? After all, historical events are all real, so wouldn’t they be more likely to convey accurate lessons rather than the prejudices of particular authors?
Maybe not, in the sense that matters. Children need to know what life is like, for the individuals living it. History doesn’t tell you that. Instead, it tells you what societies are like—how societies behave, how they change over time. They tell you that this political leader did this in response to this other leader, in a type of situation that you would never face. Hardly anyone needs this kind of knowledge in order to live their own lives.
Okay, but what if we just gave kids a lot of biographies—again, this would have the advantage of being true to life?
Sure, but this would be a lot less entertaining. Furthermore, it might be less educational, for most people do not live their lives with an eye toward conveying interesting lessons to onlookers. A storyteller can deliberately choose events to illustrate important and interesting aspects of life.
So … let your kids have plenty of stories.
II. The High School English Class Theory of Stories
In grade school English classes, I read a lot of stories. These classes never discussed anything interesting or important that one should learn about life from the stories. Instead, they focused on making kids analyze novels in terms of some theory about novels that apparently all English teachers in America believe, as if we were training to be novelists or literary theorists. I have no idea why anyone has thought that this is a good use of time.
So we were taught a theory that we were supposed to accept and apply. It didn’t include a definition of stories, but it said that all stories (or all novels?) have at least three elements: they have a central conflict, they come to a climax, and then there is a resolution of the conflict. There were three types of conflicts that a story could have: “man versus man”, “man versus nature”, and the conceptually weird “man versus himself”.
Is this theory true? I think it is too narrow.
First, I don’t see why every story must be about a conflict in any normal sense of that word—say, a process in which agents are working at cross purposes to each other. But then, the inclusion of “man versus nature” and “man versus himself” tip us off that “conflict” isn’t being used in any ordinary sense. If you’re just using “conflict” to mean “any pursuit of a goal”, it would be better to say that.
But even that I think is too narrow. A story could be about how some interesting outcome came about, which need not center on someone pursuing a goal. Consider Rudyard Kipling’s “Just-So” stories of how the Camel got his hump, how the Leopard got his spots, etc. (Basically, the Camel was really lazy, and a genie told him to stop being so lazy, but he refused, so the genie gave him a big hump on his back. The camel learned his lesson, and now camels are responsible pack animals.) These are paradigm examples of stories, but they are really not naturally described as centered on some conflict that has to get resolved, or even on some goal that someone is pursuing.
Second, even if a story centers on a conflict, it needn’t be “man” (or humans) versus something. E.g., Watership Down tells the story of some rabbits who are searching for a new home after their old one is destroyed. (But perhaps “man” really just meant “any agent”, so talking rabbits count?)
Third, there needn’t be a climax, i.e., a specific point where the emotional tension is highest, and then everything gets resolved after that.
Fourth, I don’t think “man”, “nature”, and “self” exhaust the things you could be in conflict with. (Consider Sarah Connor’s conflict with the Terminator robot.) Nor need a story involve only one conflict or conflict type. On the way to the ultimate outcome, the protagonist could come into conflict with multiple different things.
III. What Is a Story?
I have consumed many stories in my time, mostly science fiction and fantasy stories, in addition to some from the more boring genres. (Hence the character of most of my examples.) What do they have in common? I don’t know what definitions other people have proposed (I don’t have time to do that kind of research for a weekly blog), but it seems to me that stories have in common something like this:
A series of causally connected events that explain some significant outcome.
There are probably counterexamples to this, because if there is anything we learn from the history of analytic philosophy, it is that there are counterexamples to everything, including this. But that’s roughly what a story is.
Causal connection
The causal connection clause screens out potential elements that are not part of the story. If something happens that doesn’t affect anything else in the story, nor is affected by anything else in the story, then it isn’t part of the story. An author might include such elements (say, to establish one of the characters’ character) but there will be an intuitive sense in which those elements aren’t really part of the story. (But the character’s character would be causally connected to the events in the story.)
Possible counterexample? Greg Egan’s novel, Incandescence. There are two alternating narratives, one involving some humans and one involving aliens on a world orbiting a black hole. Throughout the novel, I kept waiting for the two to meet and their stories merge. But as I recall, it never happened. I would say that, although this was a single book, it wasn’t a single story; it was two stories that happened to be weirdly interleaved, because the two weren’t causally connected.
Significance
When you’re reading (or watching) a story, you usually do not know what significant outcome is to be explained. But when you get to the end, the ending will be some significant outcome that will turn out to have been explained by everything that went before.
Significant outcomes are ones that we find significant—maybe they’re morally significant, maybe we have emotional reactions about them, or maybe they’re just interesting. (Consider how the Just-So Stories explain how the camel got its hump, how the leopard got his spots, etc.)
Outcome
The outcome will usually be the resolution of some problem, or someone’s success or failure in attaining some goal. (But it could be the attainment of some other interesting situation, like the leopard having spots.) The significant outcome determines when the story is over; otherwise, a series of causally connected events could go on indefinitely.
In, say, the Harry Potter novels, which could be regarded as constituting one long story, there is a problem that the Dark Lord Voldemort wants to take over the world. The story continues until the outcome of that situation is known: either Voldemort succeeds in taking over the world, or he is decisively defeated. If the series stopped before one of those things happened, you’d say it was incomplete; if it continued much after that, you’d say there was extra stuff appended.
Of course, the notion of a “significant outcome” is vague, so it is vague what counts as a story. But it isn’t empty; if J.K. Rowling had just told us about some of the conflict between Harry Potter and Voldemort but never told us, as we would say, “how it all turned out”, then we’d say she never finished the story.
Non-Fiction Stories
I’ve been talking about fiction above, but we often refer to non-fiction stories, as when two accomplices to a crime decide to “get their stories straight”, or when I say that a student “told me an implausible story” about why he couldn’t finish his paper on time. These examples can both be understood in terms of the above definition. In the latter case, the student’s excuse might be a borderline case of a story or a non-story, if the “series of events” is just a single event.
In Quantum Mechanics and Experience, David Albert opens by telling “an unsettling story (the most unsettling story, perhaps, to have emerged from any of the physical sciences since the seventeenth century) about something that can happen to electrons.” He recounts some experiments that can be done on electrons, which are analogous to the famous double-slit experiment but conceptually simpler (he mentions the double-slit experiment too).
That’s only sort of a story; it might be a metaphorical use of “story”. But it too can be understood in terms of the above definition (sort of). The series of events is the series of experiments and their results. The significant “outcome” is the conclusion that particles can be in a weird state called a “superposition”.
. . .
To think about later: What makes for a good or bad story? (For example, why are all of Isaac Asimov’s stories better than all of William Shakespeare’s stories?)
Interesting. To add, compelling stories are sometimes not just psychologically realistic, but exaggerating real traits people have to make their point clear. For example, historical nobles in medieval Europe were not nearly as treasonous as their counterparts in Game of Thrones.
Dr. Huemer,
Have you yet been invited to appear on Micah Siegel's Nature's Guardians podcast to discuss your book Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism?
I enjoy reading your books and articles. But sometimes, assuming I don't misinterpret your words, I disagree with something you say. If we genuinely disagree, we can't both be right. Since you're a professional philosopher and I'm just an amateur, it seems antecedently likely that the error is mine. But I'm seldom able to discover my mistakes.
For example, in today's Fake Nous article you make two claims I find implausible: (1) books of fiction “are, in a sense, books of lies” and (2) “there are counterexamples to everything, including this”.
I'll take claim (2) first. I assume by “this” you are referring to what it seems to you that stories have in common stated in the previous paragraph, not claim (2), itself; otherwise, you'd be contradicting yourself. Even so, it appears that your claim can't avoid contradiction. For the claim that there are counterexamples to everything implies that there are counterexamples to that claim itself. If there is even one counterexample to that claim, then there must be something to which there is no counterexample, which contradicts the claim that there are counterexamples to everything. Where have I made my mistake?
I also find it implausible that books of fiction are “in a sense, books of lies.” Commonly, “lie” is taken to mean a statement, typically expressed as a declarative sentence, known or believed to be untrue by the person who expresses it with the intent to deceive some other person. Although declarative sentences in books of fiction may be untrue, it seems implausible that their authors intend to deceive their readers into believing those statements are true. I think an invention of the imagination expressed as a statement believed to be untrue but without intent to deceive anyone into accepting it as true could be better called a fiction. There is support for that view: The distinction between a lie and a fiction can be used to solve the type of liar paradox generated by such a sentence as “What I'm now saying is a lie.” Since the quoted sentence is a fiction, arguments that attempt to assign it a truth value don't lead to the conclusion that it's a lie if and only if it's not a lie. So, in what sense are declarative sentences in works of fiction lies?
Incidentally, a different distinction is required in order to adequately solve the more problematic type of liar paradox generated by sentences that mention truth or falsity, such as “This sentence is false” and “This sentence is not true”. Several people have, apparently independently, solved that type of liar paradox, none of whom I found mentioned in the References section of Paradox Lost. But all published only what I call the basic solution, which involves describing the fallacy that accounts for paradox and avoiding contradiction. The basic solution hasn't become generally accepted because it's inadequate. I possess a 10-item list of requirements of an adequate solution, which I'm willing to send you by private email if you want it. To my knowledge no one has published an adequate solution, but at least one unpublished such solution exists. Philosophers who have attempted to solve the liar paradox have often thought the paradox results from some defect in natural language, classical logic, or the ordinary notion of truth. That the solution just mentioned solves the paradox in natural language using classical logic (together with conceptual analysis) shows that the paradox doesn't arise due to some defect in language or logic.
Also, the paradox doesn't indicate a defect in the ordinary notion of truth but in the theories of truth most philosophers accept. The correct theory not only solves the liar paradox and some related problems, it explains in what way normative sentences can be truth apt. In Ethical Intuitionism you give good reasons to believe that normative statements can be truth apt but you don't explain in what way they can be truth apt. The positive statement “Snow is white” seems to be true in the correspondence sense, but the normative statement “It's wrong to torture infants” seems to be true in a different way. You can't observe the wrongness of an act in the way you can observe the whiteness of snow.