Truth, Fiction, and Strangeness

So I was re-reading some Subnormality and encountered the one about Princess Washburn. That got me thinking. The debunkery on display here is nice, but what exactly is she debunking?

Well, she's trying to debunk the idea that "truth is stranger than fiction". That's an aphorism, and debunking one of those is a little like debunking poetry. And if you look at how she goes about it, you can tell how she thinks about the aphorism.

She's using a counterexample, which tells me she thinks of the aphorism as a statement of the type "P always has property Q," specifically, "Fiction is always less strange than truth." She then provides a counterexample consisting of a character who is more strange than truth. QED!

Still, I wonder...

First of all, how do you measure strangeness? If it has to do somehow with averages, then any discrete object you choose is likely to fall away from that average on some scale of measure. The "normal" is an abstraction, even an illusion. Strangeness is more of an intuitive sense of difference from lived or imagined experience. A red, fire-breathing dragon seems less strange than a plaid, gravel-breathing one even though both are equally nonexistent. The red kind is just more common in the domain of fantasy.

Princess Washburn is certainly strange as far as fantasy people go, relative both to other fantasy and reality. But there are real people just as singular relative to other real people, as she is to fantasy people. She just gets to be extra weird by having properties no real person could have. There is a sense in which fiction has the luxury of being stranger because it need not exist. Truth is constrained by reality; fiction only by imagination. Fiction has another degree of weirdness freedom.

But that leads to another question. Is Princess Washburn really fictional? I don't mean, of course, that I think she might be real. I'm not talking about the axis of real vs. fictional. I'm talking about what it means to be fictional, given that one is known to be imaginary. Anything made up is imaginary, but what is fictional?

It seems reasonable to claim that the fictional is anything pertaining to fiction. And except for the fact that she is being discussed by fictional characters in a comic, Princess Washburn has only a tenuous connection to any narrative structure or fictional construct. The details that make her so weird are chosen randomly for the effect of strangeness. What connects coins, spiders, the Rolling Stones, and ultraviolet light, except for being related somehow to Princess Washburn?

Not a whole lot. Her personal details have the broad, scattered effect that the details of a real person do, the effect of springing from a deep, complex, and unstructured development process that is largely opaque to outside observers. Fictional characters, on the other hand, are generally expected to have fairly clear motivations within the confines of the narrative arc.

I think that may be where the aphorism comes from. Saying that truth is stranger than fiction is acknowledging that fiction is a human artifact with fairly simple rules and an expected structure. Fiction, as people say, has to make sense. True stories also make sense, just in a different kind of context. All the motivations are richer, and the character development is more organic, because it is real. Princess Washburn is strange because everything that makes her who she is, is hidden from us. Any real person would also seem strange if all you know about them was a dozen or so random facts.

The personal details of fictional characters are meant to advance the story. But Princess Washburn is a character without a story, or at least not an accessible one. She is more like a real person, in a sense, than a fictional one, except for the part where she doesn't exist. She isn't fictional. She's imaginary.

Henry VIII

A jolly comic!

Going to the Bookstore

An issue of terminology.

Wheel in the Sky

A comic.

Double comic after a long break!

Double comic. There are two.

Mathy comics

In Questionable Content, Hannelore reveals one of her hobbies: theoretical knitting. If you've ever wondered why bubble-form tests ask you to use a #2 pencil, XKCD reveals the awful truth. And Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal pits A 17th Century Explorer vs. Calculus.

Getting some eats.

At long last a comic!

It's like a graphic novel.

It's a comic on 5/23, appropriately irregular. I think this would make a great movie.

A Nightmare

After a long pause, a comic. Friday this time.

mathematics, astronomy, religion

I found something on the Library of Congress website: a collection of images from the Vatican Library of mathematical manuscripts from between the ninth and fifteenth centuries.

Saturday Comic:


The background is an ultra deep field photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and credit is due to ESA and NASA.

Pascal's quote is from the Pensées, numbers 205-206.

Reputation

Rooster image from here.
All kinds of quotations about mathematics and by mathematicians can be found here.


According to St. Augustine:

The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell.

This makes much more sense when you realize that in this context, a "mathematician" is what we would call an "astrologer".

An interesting essay and a comic.

I found something interesting on Reddit today, which is somewhat connected to the content of yesterday's posting. Here is an essay by a teacher and mathematician arguing that math education is too focused on notation and formulas instead of teaching kids about the art of discovering elegant numerical patterns and relationships. He suggests that mathematics should be art and play.

Also, here is the math subreddit.

Theorem Loafing

Time for the Wednesday comic.

Next comic early.

More adventures with Calvin.

Comic time.

It's Wednesday and that means time for a comic.

Now for a comic.

The reason I like John Napier is that he was one of those people who was like a superhero. Between inventing logarithms, writing theology, and cultivating a terrifying reputation, he had plenty of time left over for general awesomeness.