I can imagine that many of the claims I tend to make would annoy historians, among others.

I tend to say that knowledge isn’t a matter of fact or fiction, but of honest or dishonest fiction.

And I tend to say that a conclusion puts an end to learning.

Historians, reporters and police detectives (among others), however, are often diligent in sorting fact FROM fiction, and wouldn’t take kindly to any smudging of those distinctions. They also tend to work towards a conclusive determination of events. They might argue that the question, “did this happen or not?” demands a conclusive answer in order to learn anything substantial. So right away, both of my claims will seem outlandish from their perspectives.

I myself would argue that we need to retain a distinction between fact and fiction if the context (such as law) is premised on this distinction. We have to understand the definitions and frameworks of any foreign language. But I would argue that these linguistic distinctions are themselves fictional inventions. “Fact or fiction” ‘is a fictional way of sorting events.

After all, a fact (under microscopic examination) is by itself a meaningless dot of data in an infinite sea of data points. Facts only begin to make sense when they are strung together in a narrative. In other words, we can’t understand any fact without understanding the context, which is the story that defines the fact. I can’t think of a single fact that isn’t part of an explanatory narrative, like beads on a string.

Creativity is inseparable from the collection of facts.

Still, historians wouldn’t call this form of creative storytelling “fictional.” And they would still fully embrace the need to be conclusive, even reductively so, in their final assessment of what happened.

And yet the historian, reporter and detective are still producing interpretive representations of what happened in a medium of language that is utterly different in substance from the unrecoverable actuality of the past. Anyone in any field who fails to keep this distinction in mind is no longer forming theories, but dogmas. The slack in the difference between theory and actuality can never fully disappear. The two substances will remain distinct.

The question is, do we design theories as proposed final answers, or do we design theories as additional insights or ways of honestly (and creatively) spinning the prism of what happened (which suggests no final conclusion)?

Sometimes the “final answer” seems too obvious to retain a suspended state of theoretical uncertainty. Final conclusions seem most obvious in the study of microscopic dots of data on a chemical or biological level. Technicians are constantly “determining” the nature of chemical compounds and cause and effects of such compounds. But whether we perceive these chemical dots as “the basis of life itself” or as a material footprint of something far more subtle than chemistry is how we tell the story.

Every story that is taken too literally ends up creating the false impression of its own centrality. We can’t live without a chemical imagination, chemistry is LIFE. Well, sound is life too, and light, and I’ve seen signs that say “baseball is life”, and fishing and math and religion and every other story imaginable. They all start to see themselves at the center of the universe. But none of them are central without human imagination telling that story.

Or take a more extreme example: The discovery of a murdered body in the basement of a house belonging to a blood-soaked murder suspect holding the murder weapon may conclusively “tell the story” of what happened. The prosecutor presents a theory of murder that is almost never open-ended but tends towards a final answer. Nevertheless, what the prosecutor argues, even if it is coherent and honest, remains a story. And even stories this obvious are premised on hidden assumptions that are purely fictional.

At present, all serial killers are assumed to be responsible for their actions. This assumption strongly influences how we tell the story of the crime scene and how we respond to the criminal. But no matter how firmly you may believe that this assumption is right, it’s not a physical fact, but only a widely shared faith. You can’t point to free will or free choice as physical evidence. These are dramatic ways we frame the story of who we are.

And as I discussed in several recent essays, neither free will nor free choice are defensible positions if examined under a microscope. A more insightful assumption might even be the far more radical one that serial killers are more or less already parasitized souls, zombies of a sort, a predator’s food, its last signs of life, these automatic compulsions that push and pull them with an inanimate machine’s sociopathic logic, which arose in the absence of empathy.

Perhaps, the real human being (whatever that may be) lies buried under this twisted machinery of thought. Maybe it is dormant, or a seed withering under rubble.

This essay isn’t arguing any of these possibilities, but noting that a change in our assumptions about “responsibility” or “identity” (for example) would drastically change the way even an obvious murder story is told and whether or not it still feels wise to respond without empathy, as sociopaths ourselves, in retribution.

Nothing seems quite so conclusive when we realize how many fictional assumptions underly our conclusions about reality. And there is no way to rid ourselves of these hidden faiths and fictional orientations, because everything we do or think or feel is premised on some form of faith. Action would become impossible if a story wasn’t presumed either as blind faith or as open-eyed theory (or metaphor or the nuance of insight).

In other words, perhaps the best we can do is not be blind in our faith, but honest about the fictional nature of our knowledge. If we recognize this fictional sub-basement, then it’s possible to see fact and fiction as a fictional dichotomy itself, which is useful in some surface contexts. Maybe the prosecution’s story is correct in the present inhumane cultural context, but incoherent at a deeper level of humane consideration. If we accept this fictional ground to knowledge, then we’re a little less apt to be dogmatic and unforgiving in our beliefs about what is real and what is not real.

This is why I still prefer the fictional distinction between honest and dishonest fiction in most contexts, rather than the more dogmatic black and white distinction between fact and fiction.

The historian, detective and reporter are still doing the same important work, uncovering the nature of reality. But rather than claiming that what we discover is the final word, they retain a theorist’s suspension of certainty, a capacity to see prismatically, and recognize the fictional distortions that are inseparable from language and cultural baggage itself. Then they know (by default) that there will always exist undiscovered assumptions, which, if suspended, dramatically change the color and shape of our understanding of reality, no matter how obvious the evidence at present might seem.

This is the inevitable humility of realizing the limitations of thought and language.