Tipping Points Emerge in the Interaction Between Narrative and Reality

Abstract

The paper considers narratives as dynamic memory banks and shifts understanding from emphasizing the origins of the present to the emergence of the present. In the construction of reality, imagined futures articulate with knowledge obtained in the past. In another inversion, rather than explain change and consider stability as the norm, it focuses on change as the norm and investigates the creation of stability to explain, for example, why our societies are so slow in acting on climate change. The creation of meaning is the result of an interaction between thinking and experience, like the interaction between a map and the territory it represents. It reduces the complexity of the territory to the simplicity of the map, shaping simultaneously the cognitive map and the territory it represents. Such cognitive structures evolve into dense networks of cognitive dimensions. Tipping points emerge as a particular cognitive structure is no longer enabling a society to deal with its changing environment because it does not fully trace the logical and functional nature of the relationship between the two. To facilitate that, we need to understanding noise as signals for which no interpretative conceptual and cognitive structure has yet been identified.