1. Fact & fiction are agreements. A story both teller and listener believe to be true could be labelled "fact" and one both agree is untrue could be "fiction". However those are not the only possibilities. A story the listener believes to be true but not believed to be so by the teller would probably be labelled a "lie" by a 3rd party. And the reverse might be labelled a "error" (or a delusion at worst).
2. In most social situations there is no 3rd party umpire of truth & falsity. And agreement on "fact" and "fiction" can be murky esp. when talking about interpretations and motivations. We end up negotiating a lot of this stuff.3. The belief of a listener or teller in the story is not always constant. As a teller I might distort events for any number of reasons both innocuous (e.g. compressing events to make the story easier to follow) or self-serving (to influence the listener). As listener I constantly revise my belief of the story - esp. if I don't know the teller well or doubt their reliability.
I'd like to do an experiment where a story is told over the phone with teller and listener being able to control a slider with "totally true" at one end and "totally false" at the other. The result would be a pattern drawn on the above matrix (with a time component - you might show that with a gradual change in colour from start to end).
I wonder what the patterns would look like?
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2 comments:
Matt - I really like this 4 box model. In particular...it makes me think about it relative to the current political discussions in the US. Sigh.
Keep up the great work! Jen
This concept of lie and truth mapped on the four boxes looks really tempting to be experimented.
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