DUCKPOND

Don’t take what I say as gospel, but obviously I think I might be right. According to Wikipedia, mythos is a collection of [stories] in the scholarly sense. I am very much prone to stories, and so am inclined to generalize that propensity to the rest of humankind. (My reference is to the mythos/logos division that Robert Pirsig wrote about.)

Don Arthur sets the case up better, he writes, via Troppo:

Nothing’s easier to understand than a story. It’s as if human beings were hardwired for narrative — stories with beginnings, middles and ends populated by people doing things. According to cognitive scientists Roger Schank and Robert Abelson that’s not far from the truth.

Back in 1995 Schank and Abelson hypothesized that virtually all human knowledge is based on stories constructed around past experiences. Whenever we come across something new we try to fit into the framework provided by an old story. So it’s no surprise to find, as Andrew Norton does, that most of Australia’s top public intellectuals are storytellers and moralists rather than social scientists.

We tell stories inspite of ourselves, regardless that we espouse, and so caught up by the rigors of the real as Nobel Prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman (1918 – 1988). You might like to listen to his lecture, including Photons Corpuscles of Light, delivered at The University of Auckland in 1976, via originally referred to by Brad DeLong, and then watch him telling his own stories. The “I am irresponsible” story, Robert Feynman actually states he created a myth so as to have time to think about the problems of quantum mechanics.

Postscript: 09 October 2006

I think this may be relevant. Jason Soon draws attention to this recent article at Catallaxy. For what it is worth, I am trying to get my head around the proposition that pre-Settlement Aboriginal societies, for example, had a more integrated cosmology than we do, even as it must be admitted we potentially know far more. For one thing, I am guessing, Aboriginal society did not have numbers of priests, professors and other experts we need. Or you could say, as Robert Feynman does in Ancient Egypt, for examples, the priests were the professors. I recall a quote from Thales to effect, “I spent seven years of my life with the geometers of Egypt.” It is a fair guess the geometers were also priests.