Story and Art
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms
Provide the connection between pre-historical thinking and today. Our capacity for telling and hearing story are no doubt the underlying capacity that is harnessed in the development of advanced methods of thinking.
Look at what can be said about this capacity and its depth and breadth.
Some of the pragmatists move towards aesthetics as an ethical stance. In the end the theorist is selecting models pragmatically, but when theory is to early or speculative the aesthetic choices of individual scientists will be a guide. In Lewis' terms, the given is not responsive to our choices, but the a priori, and hence the real are so dependent.
Our thesis is that the story is fundamental to thinking. Language itself emerges from proto-languages that are functional, but don't have modern grammar and phonetics before the laryinx evolved to its modern form. We began to tell our stories, to show each other how to use fire and thereby invent the hearth, and we continued to tell and invent out story around a dying fire deep into the evening and night.
Kant's synthetic a priori shouldn't be some abstract geometry invented by the greeks, it is the capacity to invent and tell stories. From primitive observations and arguments we invent fantastical explainations and only much later do we develop any capacity to critically review any of it because we haven't invented writing yet. Story is enough to transmit rudimentary knowledge in the form or story, myth and religion. Some researchers think that language and tool making might be related capacities, that the left brain areas that are specialized in speech related centers also function in many sequential tasks and functions. Perhaps we also have some right brain functions related to spacial reasoning and what inspired Kant as connected to the insights of Galileo and Newton.
It turns out the the geometric intuition we posess is perfectly wonderful at the human scale, but when we extend our senses with finer or more sophisticated instraments and develop physics based on more and more abstract mathematics where physical intuition is more misleading than natural. Even so, our ability to develop these abstractions in response the perceptions of our extended senses. Using our innate capacity for sense making, we have gone so far beyond what is immediately present to the senses that we are confident that if we do meet self-aware aliens we will have discovered similar math and physical science insights even if our home worlds, life processes and sensory modes are extremely different. This may be somewhat tangential to current topic, but I think we might also suggest that our alien friends will have built their capacity to understand the world on something like stories that are the precursers to reason and self-consciousness.
A story is a sequential, causal description of events that is well suited to a bipedal primate trying to survive. It also makes possible something else, self-reflection, and from that seed all of philosophy grows. To be sure, it is a slow process at first, but even then, it is lightning fast compared to other evolutionary changes. This is because it introduces the possibility of a new level of consciousness, collective (self-)consciousness.