I’ve been thinking lately about the reality of stories. I don’t have much penchant for doing science myself, but I respect its ability to uncover truth enough to consider the scientifically revealed universe as fundamental reality. That is to say, as much as I struggle to understand how atoms work, much less quarks, I believe that reality necessarily consists in the interactions of such particles. By contrast, I am significantly more invested in stories – hearing them, creating them, passing them on – even though I am much less certain about the extent to which I should consider them real. Now, you may say, “What difference does that make?” – but this is a Philosophy bistro, after all, and that’s really kind of a sour attitude you’re taking. Now here: have a refreshing cup of lime and mint-infused ice water as I get your appetizer order in. You’re welcome.

My stepdaughters know I’m full of it. We’ve lived in the same house together for a little over a year, and they’ve gotten in the habit of responding to almost anything I say by asking, “Really?” I always immediately confess if I’ve made up the thing I just said, and try to keep to something close to a 50% truth ratio going. It’s particularly fun when I’ve found some fact that seems so absurd that it must be fiction, so that I get to swear “Yes” over and over to each repeated “Really?” At the same time, it’s as important to me as it is to their mother that we be truthful with each other when we need to. Lying about, say, whether you threw a toy at your sister is never okay. What’s more, the girls seem to have some predilection toward science, and especially because I know how easy it is for girls and women to get pushed out of those fields, I’m doing my best to encourage empirical observation and other basic science skill sets to help them stay on that track if they choose to. Yet I smile most when they tell stories too – when they engage in some ridiculous word play or spontaneously come up with an absurd explanation. As long as we still keep track of what the truth is for when we need it, I value that kind of play more than I value the truth.

So maybe it just doesn’t matter whether stories are real or not. Except that, as a matter of fact, I think they are. That reality isn’t, of course, the same as that enjoyed by atoms and quarks. But stories are an aspect of our shared environment. Saturday Night Live’s Jack Handy once quipped, “I bet one legend that keeps recurring throughout history, in every culture, is the story of Popeye,” which is funny because that’s actually pretty hard to imagine. Popeye doesn’t seem a likely candidate for a cultural universal. But he is widely known to Americans, so much so that your audience is likely to understand many references to him instantly. I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that nearly every time I throw a little olive oil in the pan I hear his scraggly voice singing, “Oh Olive Oyl.” (As voices in your head go, this isn’t a bad one.) But even if most people wouldn’t remember that, they would know that spinach instantly makes you extremely strong and prone to getting into fistfights with your enormous forearms. This isn’t a tremendously rich store to draw on. At most it might liven up, say, your encouraging your daughter to eat her spinach, or to not get in fistfights, or to eschew ethnic profiling. (What ethnicity was Popeye, anyway? And has anyone ever actually talked like that?)

Other stories are much richer, though. Sacred texts like the Torah, the New Testament, and the Quran have been passed down perhaps most of all through individual stories like the parable of the good Samaritan, which people repeat in order to make sense of their own and others’ actions. (The Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man has fun with this by presenting a series of inscrutable parables, including “The Goy’s Teeth,” that it resolutely refuses to explicate for the audience.) Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin provided such a condemnatory picture of slavery that pro-slavery authors fought back with competing novels with titles like Uncle Robin, in His Cabin in Virginia, and Tom Without One in Boston. But Stowe’s narrative largely won out and her account of Eliza’s escape with her son over the icy Ohio River provided common inspiration for abolitionists all over the North in the decade leading up to the Civil War. Generations later, many African-Americans would so object to aspects of Stowe’s characterization of slaves that “Uncle Tom” would become a denigrating epithet for a black man taken to act submissively toward whites.

All of these examples indicate some of the many ways that stories provide a shared means of interpreting our experiences, without which we would struggle much more to understand each other. Maybe if stories can have that much effect, it doesn’t matter whether we consider them “real” or not. “Made up” is a kind of real too.