What is Story?

This is Part 3 of a subscriber-only preview of my upcoming book Outsourcing Consciousness: How Social Networks are Making Us Lose Our Minds. We will release the first five chapters through the end of the year. Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

There are countless ways to describe what a story is and what it does. We might say that a story is a description of a series of things that happened, or else we might say that a story is how we imagine something that might have happened. Joseph Conrad taught us that story is sometimes a public dream and sometimes a private myth. Leo Tolstoy or whomever we decide actually said it reminds us that story boils down to a man going on a journey or a stranger coming to town[i]. Joan Didion embraces story as humanity’s tool to ‘freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.’ All useful definitions, all true.

And yet our purpose in this book is to understand how story springs from and interacts with human consciousness under different conditions. For that reason, I think it is most useful to resolve toward a definition which aligns with how our brain processes and produces story, and also toward how human societies continuously explore, refine, and influence the meaning of those stories. This will also help us to establish a through-line – important for any Narrative – between the evolutionary processes and imperatives which predispose us to tell and seek out stories on the one hand, and the technologies like writing or social networks which expose us to them on the other. So what is story?

Okay, so perhaps it is not especially helpful to provide a definition for something like ‘story’ by using yet another common word which I mean in a very particular way, but here we are. When I say ‘symbol’, I mean it in the somewhat more formal sense of the field we call semiotics. It is a philosophical tradition which runs from Aristotle through Augustine to Locke and thereafter to a veritable pantheon of modern linguists and thinkers. When most of us think of a symbol, we probably think about something that has been abstracted into something representational – like a piece of art that we associate with an idea, a feeling, a concept, or even something more tangible. Or like the main character in a Dan Brown novel describing every work of art in the Louvre as a very secret penis to spite the Vatican. Frankly, both examples are kind of what I am talking about. But semiotics is less about the cognitive processes involved in the generalization or representation of something for some purpose and more about how meaning is communicated, interpreted, and attached to objects[ii]. Whereas an abstraction generalizes, a symbol signifies. Sometimes this will seem like a distinction without a difference. If you find it difficult to separate them at times, join the club. After all, it is a simple matter of, well, abstracting away certain properties and purposes of the symbol to arrive at the concept of an abstraction. As our story unfolds, I will attempt to lay out why it is instructive to retain those properties.

The most useful semiotic framework for the story of the outsourcing of consciousness, I think, is the one proposed by 19^th century American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Designed to be comprehensive and foundational, it carries applications for philosophy, formal logic, and linguistics alike. At the heart of this framework is the bold idea that all thought involves the interaction with and interpretation of signs[iii]. Given the expansiveness of his definition, it is not an unreasonable contention: Peirce describes a sign as ‘something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity.’[iv] Thanks, Chuck, that’s very helpful. All joking aside, the universality of Peirce’s definition gives us a useful vocabulary to work with.

What is perhaps more helpful is that unlike many earlier semiotic frameworks, Peirce’s is less singularly obsessed with whether and how signs diverge from reality or truth[v]. In De Interpretatione, for example, Aristotle considers words – one of the most common symbols each of us encounter daily – as the corrupter of an otherwise pure corridor between human thought and reality. In his framework, written language was a flawed representation of natural oral language, which was itself a flawed representation of the truths revealed by both reality and thought[vi]. Similarly, Plato in his dialogues often expressed skepticism about the ability of language to capture the true essence of the forms, seeing signs as mere shadows of reality. In Cratylus, he likewise debates the accuracy of names and words in representing the true nature of things, suggesting that language often falls short of conveying absolute truths[vii]. John Locke also wrestles with the imperfections of language, describing words as arbitrary signs that can mislead if not used carefully, and stressing the importance of clear definitions to align signs with the ideas they represent[viii].

Unlike these earlier thinkers, Peirce’s contemporary Ferdinand de Saussure posits that the relationship between the signifier (the form of the word) and the signified (the concept) is arbitrary and based on social convention, focusing on the structural relations within language itself rather than its correspondence to external reality[ix]. Peirce, on the other hand, embraces a more dynamic and pragmatic approach. He emphasizes the role of minds engaged in interpretation. This continuous process of interrogating meaning allows signs to evolve and adapt within a network of interpretations rather than converging toward a static correspondence with either the absolute reality of the empiricist or the arbitrary social convention of the postmodernist. His is a living semiotics. If story is the water in which humanity has been swimming for 1.8 million years – and I will make the argument that it is – then for the language of human consciousness, such signs are its atoms.

The structure of sign relation in Peirce’s semiotics is relatively simple and consists of three relational components: a sign, an object, and an interpretant. A sign, again, is simply something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It needn’t be anything fancy, metaphorical, symbolic, literal, absolute, relative, or otherwise. An object is anything a sign might reference. But when I say ‘anything’ I do not mean any thing. An object might be real, fictional, tangible, intangible, an idea, a quality, a property, a state, a feeling, a sense, a proposition, a principle, or anything else under the sun. An interpretant is the meaning generated in the mind of the interpreter when encountering a sign. Importantly, the interpretant is not a static property but a thing under constant interrogation, both by minds and those who influence them. The role of cultural norms in mediating the meaning of many sorts of signs is a feature of this framework, neither an undesirable artifact in need of culling nor an arbitrary property whose anchor to reality we must despair at ever finding. Yet Peirce’s framework also acknowledges the reality that some signs do possess rather more straightforward, if not entirely objective, mechanisms for establishing meaning.

A stop sign at an intersection is a sign. I mean, yes, of course it is a sign, but a red metal octagon with the word ‘STOP’ written on it is also a sign. The action or concept of stopping one’s vehicle at a particular point on the road is one object which this sign references. When a driver sees the stop sign, the interpretant is the driver’s understanding and recognition that they need to bring their vehicle to a halt. Unless they’re most cyclists, in which case they alternatingly act like a vehicle or a pedestrian depending on which is more convenient to them at the time. This interpretant is shaped not just by the driver’s personal experience and cognition, but also by broader cultural norms and legal regulations that dictate the meaning of such traffic signs. A laughing face emoji in a text message is also a sign. The object might be the humor the sender found in a previous message. The interpretant is the recipient’s interpretation of the message as an affirmation of humor, influenced by their understanding of the emoji’s common usage in digital communication. The interpretant is always subject to variation depending on the context and the individual’s experiences and cultural background, and both signs and objects may be associated with a great many interpretants in various senses.

Within this nearly limitless universe of signs, Peirce proposes many more categories, but they are largely reducible to three: icons, indices, and symbols. An icon is a likeness; it looks like its object, resembles it, or makes us feel like it. A statue of a tree is an icon because it visually represents a tree. An onomatopoeia is an icon because the sound of the word imitates the sound it describes. An index, on the other hand, references its object through observed logical connections in fact. Smoke is an index of fire because of the direct, physical, and causal relationship between the two. A symbol is a sign whose relationship to the object is dependent on norm, convention, or habit. A swastika is a symbol. A checkered flag at a race is a symbol. Even our stop sign is a symbol. There is nothing about it which can tell us what it is absent what we all say that it is. Just because the extent of shared interpretation within a culture is strong, it does not mean that a sign ceases to be a symbol.

The meaning of each of these signs may require us to interrogate related signs, whether we do so directly or indirectly. Some of those signs may be of different types. For example, the placement of a stop sign is itself a sign, but it is an index rather than a symbol. That is, there is a connection in fact between the placement of a sign at an intersection and the interpretant that the sign must be communicating something about the management of traffic at that intersection. The sign relation of even deeply abstracted symbols will almost always include such iconic and indexical properties in their structure.

If these ideas seem daunting or at least like a not-very-helpful answer to what is story, I will attempt to alleviate your concerns with more references to genitalia. Consider the Venus. Not the god or the planet, which are interesting enough signs of their own, but the statues of women with anatomically impractical but scientifically interesting breasts and butts that archaic humans found it impossible not to carve from stones that had enough initial likeness to the female form. On the north bank of the River Draa near the Moroccan town of Tan-Tan, a German archaeologist named Lutz Fiedler discovered in the late 1990s what appears to be a carved figure of the human female form with unusually wide hips and large breasts[x]. If it is not merely an accident of eons of erotic erosion, it is the oldest such item we know, perhaps 300,000 years old or more.

When the artist creates a sculpture of the exaggerated human female form like the Venus of Tan-Tan, he may be representing women. He may be representing A woman. His representation is neither women or A woman, of course. It is a shaped bit of quartzite. In shaping it, his mind engages in an act of abstraction. If we described this act of human expression, we might also say that the figure acts as a sign of several kinds. In one sense it is an icon; it is a likeness which would require no cultural conditioning to interpret. It looks like the thing we are saying it is. We might even go so far as to say precisely that: ‘This figure means a woman.’

The figure is also an index, which means that it would be interpreted in context of its self-evident and often causal associations. The enlarged representations of both the primary and secondary sexual organs would be related in most minds to both sex and fertility in ways that would not rely meaningfully on cultural conditioning. You are a human. You don’t need a culture suffused with Sir Mixalot references to have an opinion concerning big butts. Thus, we might say that ‘This figure means fertility’ or ‘This figure means feminine beauty.’

Yet in various human cultures, the figure might have enforced meaning and significance. In many, cultural conditioning might cause the interpretation of this sign as ‘This figure means fecundity of the land,’ or even something like ‘This is the goddess Isis or Ishtar’ or the precepts and teachings the priests of that land associate with those goddesses. In this way, the figure is a symbol. In acting as a symbol, it would not be hard to imagine that the figure itself might come to take on meaning in yet other symbols within that culture.

Because symbols lack resemblance and evident connection to the objects they reference, it would be easy to presume that they are arbitrary, that there is no useful meaning to be derived from the fact that we use a particular word or a particular story to arrive at some meeting of the minds on meaning. Indeed, that is precisely the presumption of many semioticians. It is also hogwash. Describing the relationships between symbols and the things they refer to as ‘arbitrary’ ignores the semiotic processes which led to the reference in the first place. That is, symbols are grounded in interpretive processes and conventions that are anything but arbitrary, the result of end-directed interactions among agents who interpret various behaviors as significant. There is an historical and social context to the embedding and use of symbols, too. Symbols are what Terrence Deacon called “doubly conventional,” relying on conventions both in their formation as sign vehicles and in their means of reference[xi]. When we understand that the process whereby the meaning of symbols is mediated creates a kind of order, we must reject any notion of the arbitrariness of their relationship to the objects to which they refer. In other words, we cannot suggest that a systematic, convention-mediated process which led to the assignment of symbolic semiotic relationships would not carry residuals of that process. Symbolic reference is rarely truly arbitrary but very often an emergent property of a complex system of semiotic negotiation.

Part of the beauty of Peirce’s semiotics as a logical system is that, in some sense, we can even think of this process of symbol creation and interrogation in context of the signs which led to symbols of now unrecognizable origin. When the idiom that we “died laughing” or are “dead” as an expression of humor fades from the public consciousness, the skull or gravestone emoji in widespread use by Gen Z to reflect humor may well remain as a symbol of indeterminate origin. Or not. Either way, it is silly to think that this makes all human culture reducible to iconic signs – representations that resemble other things. Sometimes symbols really are divorced from concrete meaning and wholly culturally mediated in ways that the process whereby that took place only matters in a very pedantic sense. But just as often, I think, we are forced to cease our interrogation of a symbol’s meaning because we have reached a dead end in ascertaining its origin. Just because a symbol has no resemblance or real connection to its object to us today does not mean that was always the case. That is true for symbols present both in language and in story.

To be clear, however, it must be said that story as I have defined it is not necessarily dependent on structured language. In fact, I will make the argument throughout this book that story predates structured language by perhaps 1.7 million years. I understand that this is an unusual argument. Most of our experience with story cannot be separated from the language, grammar, syntax, and vocabulary through which it is expressed. Yet symbolic sequences do not require it. A dance of seduction, for example, may be deeply symbolic, with culturally mediated ritual meaning and elements of a temporal sequential narrative. This happened, then this happened, then this happened. A gesture or a physical demonstration or even an internal thought might easily convey through symbolic illustration a causal sequence. This is true, so this is true, so this is true. Story often benefits from syntax, grammar, and the morphological features of structured language, but it does not require it. It is proper, I think, to consider story not as the child of language but as its older sibling.

So why is it important for our purposes to understand this older sibling of language both as a symbol and as a thing that is made of symbols? For three reasons, I think: because the human brain evolved uniquely to acquire symbolic systems, because the symbolic systems we call language and story have themselves evolved to be easier for humans to acquire, and because human social structures have evolved to facilitate the incorporation of new symbols into those systems. Said more succinctly, the human animal is a storyseeker and storyteller because of biological, linguistic, and cultural adaptations that took place over hundreds of thousands, and in some cases, millions of years.

We know, for example, that humans possess a peculiar capacity for thinking and communicating about the world in symbols. I will make the argument, as Deacon and others have done before me, that this is principally the result of the outsized influence that the prefrontal cortex and other brain structures responsible for inhibition and executive control wield in the brains of Homo sapiens and certain other hominin species (i.e. archaic humans before anatomically modern humans). Genetic adaptations over time caused these structures to be much larger and more connected than those of other species. In turn, the plasticity common to most animal brains caused more neural connections to form between it and other parts of our brain – especially those which govern language, motor skills, memory, and abstract thought. When I say we evolved uniquely to acquire symbolic systems, I mean that the inhibitory nature of the dominant prefrontal cortex permits human cognition to seek alternative meanings before immediately accepting concrete interpretations of various stimuli. When see a Venus figure, we are not constrained by our biology to only consider only the iconic or indexical. We may see more than ‘women’ or ‘A woman’ in such a figure.

When I say that we evolved uniquely to acquire symbolic systems, I also mean that as young children, we humans possess a special capacity for perceiving the rules of these systems in ways that brute force intellectual exercises of adults and even many algorithms could never achieve. For language and story, that means perceiving the interacting rules of recursive language, of grammar and syntax, as well also the overlapping and mutually supportive meanings of symbols within the system. I will argue at some length that this is not necessarily the result of a specialized ‘Language Acquisition Device’ as many have theorized, but the combined result of Homo sapiens’ remarkable cognitive capabilities and the extraordinary plasticity of the most altricial primate on the planet. That is, the critical periods in which our brain has not yet established firm connections and is prepared to establish neural networks from the open-ended perception of webs of meaning exceeds those of any other species by an order of magnitude. Chapters 4 and 5 will explore these biological causes of the human capacity for the acquisition of symbolic systems like language and story in greater depth.

Yet we also know that the time horizons over which most neurobiological and physiological adaptations may be selected are vastly longer than those over which non-biological systems like language and story may undergo evolution-like adaptations. Like organisms, symbolic systems like language and story have every reason to select traits which improve their odds of survival. They may do so by adopting conventions and symbolic structures which humans and human cultures are more predisposed to spread for various reasons. They may also do so by adopting morphological and other structural features which interact with human cognitive traits to make them easier to acquire. Chapter 6 will accordingly explore the features of story itself which have evolved to make it a more readily acquirable symbolic system.

On even shorter horizons than those over which language and story conventions evolve, however, human cultures demonstrate flexibility in their interrogation of the meaning of new stories. Increasingly advanced and connected societies have the capacity to rapidly incorporate such stories into existing symbolic systems, at times even adding new layers of meaning to what were before foreign and discordant references. Chapter 7 will explore how cultures rapidly interrogate – and cause humans within those cultures to internalize – new stories.

These features of human biology, language, and culture work together to make humans and human societies more capable of acquiring symbolic systems like language and story. They also empower them to more flexibly incorporate new symbolic patterns into those systems. For most of human history, these adaptations have been humanity’s superpower – a mechanism which fueled science, invention, beauty, art, poetry, music, diplomacy, and cultural exchange. In the future, I will argue, in an age defined by the technology of social networks, they may well continue to do all of those things, yet at the incalculable cost of the autonomy of mind for eight billion humans at a time. In hominin pre-history, however, as these traits established themselves, they achieved something perhaps even more remarkable. They made us who we are.

[i] For purely romantic purposes, let us pretend together that this is an authentic Tolstoy quotation and not an apocryphal utterance of some unknown writer.

[ii] Chandler, D. (2017). Semiotics: The Basics (3rd ed.). Routledge.

[iii] Peirce, C. S. (1931). ‘Pragmatism and Pragmaticism.’ In Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Vol. 5). Harvard University Press.

[iv] Peirce, C. S. (1931). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Vol. 2, paragraph 228). Harvard University Press.

[v] In fairness, Peirce entertains and spends a fair bit of time exploring dynamical objects and interpretants, both of which are in-itself conceptualizations. Nonetheless, the distinction from Aristotelian and Lockeian semiotics on this dimension is clear.

[vi] Aristotle. (1984). De Interpretatione. In J. Barnes (Ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation (Vol. 1). Princeton University Press.

[vii] Plato. (1997). Cratylus. In J. M. Cooper & D. S. Hutchinson (Eds.), Complete Works (pp. 101-156). Hackett Publishing Company.

[viii] Locke, J. (1975). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (P. H. Nidditch, Ed.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1690)

[ix] Saussure, F. de. (1983). Course in General Linguistics (R. Harris, Trans.). Open Court Publishing. (Original work published 1916)

[x] Bednarik, R. G. (2003). The earliest evidence of palaeoart. Rock Art Research, 20(2), 89-135.

[xi] Deacon, T.W. (2016) On Human (Symbolic) Nature: How the Word Became Flesh. In Embodiment in Evolution and Culture. T. Fuchs & C. Tewes, eds., pp. 129-149