“I myself am a victim to narrative,” says Alex Rosenberg, a Duke University philosophy professor whose new book hopes to convince readers that narratives — and especially narrative history — are flawed as tools of knowledge.
Rosenberg is a philosopher of science and a writer of historical fiction. How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories, out this week from MIT Press, does not deny that stories can be wonderful as art and effective at eliciting emotions that then push action. But, Rosenberg tells The Verge, stories also lull us into a false sense of knowledge and fundamentally limit our understanding of the world.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
You’re a professor of philosophy with appointments in biology and political science, and you’re also a novelist, but you’re not a neuroscientist or a historian. So how did you come to write this book?
I’ve always been besotted by history, but it’s not part of my academic credentials in any way. I am a philosopher of science, and, at one point, I went back to graduate school to study molecular biology, anatomy and physiology, and evolutionary biology. These are fields that have the tools and data and theories that have burgeoned over the last 30 years and which have begun to be able to finally shed light on the brain and human cognitive capacities and abilities. My interests have been carried along by developments of sciences that have been increasingly employed in areas like neuroscience to address some very traditional questions that philosophers have been interested in.