3 ms·

>particularly receptive to the meme of fiction Actually, our minds and memories are particularly receptive to narrative. Which can also result in problems, bo

>particularly receptive to the meme of fiction Actually, our minds and memories are particularly receptive to narrative. Which can also result in problems, both the narrative fallacy ("Our need to fit a story or pattern to a series of connected or disconnected facts" which leads us to overvalue "facts" embedded in a story format) and undervaluing of statistical and other numerical data.

FreakLegion 14y ago
Of course all narratives have a whiff of fiction about them by dint of giving thrust and bearing to what are otherwise inert facts. It doesn't much matter whether we're talking about a sci-fi novel, a political speech, a research report or a simple slogan. As Chaïm Perelman put it: "The study of argumentation compels us to take into account not only the choice of data but also the way in which they are interpreted, the meaning attributed to them. It is to the extent that it constitutes a conscious or unconscious choice between several modes of meaning, that the interpretation can be distinguished from the data being interpreted, and can be opposed to them. . . . It is precisely when incompatible interpretations make us hesitate as to how we are to conceive the datum that the problem of interpretation is very important." -- Treatise on Argumentation