What do you think?
Rate this book
How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories
Why we learn the wrong things from narrative history, and how our love for stories is hard-wired.
To understand something, you need to know its history. Right? Wrong, says Alex Rosenberg in How History Gets Things Wrong. Feeling especially well-informed after reading a book of popular history on the best-seller list? Don't. Narrative history is always, always wrong. It's not just incomplete or inaccurate but deeply wrong, as wrong as Ptolemaic astronomy. We no longer believe that the earth is the center of the universe. Why do we still believe in historical narrative? Our attachment to history as a vehicle for understanding has a long Darwinian pedigree and a genetic basis. Our love of stories is hard-wired. Neuroscience reveals that human evolution shaped a tool useful for survival into a defective theory of human nature.
Stories historians tell, Rosenberg continues, are not only wrong but harmful. Israel and Palestine, for example, have dueling narratives of dispossession that prevent one side from compromising with the other. Henry Kissinger applied lessons drawn from the Congress of Vienna to American foreign policy with disastrous results. Human evolution improved primate mind reading—the ability to anticipate the behavior of others, whether predators, prey, or cooperators—to get us to the top of the African food chain. Now, however, this hard-wired capacity makes us think we can understand history—what the Kaiser was thinking in 1914, why Hitler declared war on the United States—by uncovering the narratives of what happened and why. In fact, Rosenberg argues, we will only understand history if we don't make it into a story.
To understand something, you need to know its history. Right? Wrong, says Alex Rosenberg in How History Gets Things Wrong. Feeling especially well-informed after reading a book of popular history on the best-seller list? Don't. Narrative history is always, always wrong. It's not just incomplete or inaccurate but deeply wrong, as wrong as Ptolemaic astronomy. We no longer believe that the earth is the center of the universe. Why do we still believe in historical narrative? Our attachment to history as a vehicle for understanding has a long Darwinian pedigree and a genetic basis. Our love of stories is hard-wired. Neuroscience reveals that human evolution shaped a tool useful for survival into a defective theory of human nature.
Stories historians tell, Rosenberg continues, are not only wrong but harmful. Israel and Palestine, for example, have dueling narratives of dispossession that prevent one side from compromising with the other. Henry Kissinger applied lessons drawn from the Congress of Vienna to American foreign policy with disastrous results. Human evolution improved primate mind reading—the ability to anticipate the behavior of others, whether predators, prey, or cooperators—to get us to the top of the African food chain. Now, however, this hard-wired capacity makes us think we can understand history—what the Kaiser was thinking in 1914, why Hitler declared war on the United States—by uncovering the narratives of what happened and why. In fact, Rosenberg argues, we will only understand history if we don't make it into a story.
296 pages, Hardcover
Published October 9, 2018
50 people are currently reading
1100 people want to read
About the author
Alex Rosenberg
44 books109 followersAlex Rosenberg's first novel, "The Girl From Krakow," is a thriller that explores how a young woman and her lover navigate the dangerous thirties, the firestorm of war in Europe, and how they make sense of their survival. Alex's second novel, "Autumn in Oxford" is a murder mystery set in Britain in the late 1950s. It takes the reader back to the second world war in the American south and England before D-day, France during the Liberation and New York in the late '40s. It will be published by Lake Union in August.
Before he became a novelist Alex wrote a large number of books about the philosophy of science, especially about economics and biology. These books were mainly addressed to other academics. But in 2011 Alex published a book that explores the answers that science gives to the big questions of philosophy that thinking people ask themselves--questions about the nature of reality, the meaning of life, moral values, free will, the relationship of the mind to the brain, and our human future. That book, "The Atheist's Guide to Reality," was widely reviewed and was quite controversial.
When he's not writing historical novels, Alex Rosenberg is a professor of philosophy at Duke University.
Before he became a novelist Alex wrote a large number of books about the philosophy of science, especially about economics and biology. These books were mainly addressed to other academics. But in 2011 Alex published a book that explores the answers that science gives to the big questions of philosophy that thinking people ask themselves--questions about the nature of reality, the meaning of life, moral values, free will, the relationship of the mind to the brain, and our human future. That book, "The Atheist's Guide to Reality," was widely reviewed and was quite controversial.
When he's not writing historical novels, Alex Rosenberg is a professor of philosophy at Duke University.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 37 reviews
November 26, 2022
The American philosopher of science Alex Rosenberg (b. 1946) has a very black and white view of reality: anything that is not based on scientific ground is no good. His ‘faith’ (pun intended) is scientism, pure and simple. In this book, Rosenberg focuses on narratives, and historical narratives in particular. In this review, I’m going to focus on his critique of narratives in general.
Since the postmodern wave in the second half of the twentieth century, we know that narratives are ubiquitous; we use the frame of stories to interpret and express both the banal reality of everyday as well as fundamental issues; “everything is a story” has become a very inflationary expression. Well, says Rosenberg, these narratives just are bullshit, and what's more, they're harmful: “all narratives are wrong – wrong in the same way and for the same reason”.
To prove his point, he elaborates on the ‘Theory of Mind’-technique, that is the instrument we use to assume how other people function, what their motives and desires are. It’s a method that homo sapiens has developed throughout its evolutionary history, and that allowed it to survive. It was such a success that we have completely internalized, and still use it throughout the day. According to Rosenberg this development has come with a vengeance. Through a very detailed and technical overview of neuro-cognitive studies, he shows that this Theory of Mind constantly misleads us; because there’s no way we can be sure we’re on the right track of motives and desires of others, and that’s why we constantly make bad choices. If we have to believe Rosenberg, neurosciences have proven that this instrument makes no sense, it even has no neurological basis at all.
The only remedy according to Rosenberg is to renounce our addiction to narratives, and resolutely turn to science, through the simple registration of events and actions, sticking to factual information and expressing that in tables, graphs, etc. It’s no wonder Rosenberg ventures into a rehabilitation of the long-discredited behaviorism.
Look, I could demonstrate extensively how fundamentally wrong Rosenberg is. But I’m going to limit myself to two points of criticism. To begin with, Rosenberg is purely misleading: if you read carefully, his critique of (historical) narratives focuses almost exclusively on the process of attributing motives and desires to others (hence his focus on the Theory of Mind); that is a serious limitation of the concept of narrative. Isn’t it strange that an intelligent person like Rosenberg does not even notice that he is constantly using narratives (in the broader sense of the word) himself, almost constantly throughout this book. How could it be different: they’re ubiquitous, remember?
And secondly, his scientism is so out of line (“science and nothing but science”) that he simply ignores entire chunks of (human) reality. Try this exercise: replace the ‘Theory of Mind’-method with 'friendship' or 'love', two other forms of human relating; it is quite simple to show that friendship and love in many cases are just illusions, are neuro-cognitive based on nothing, and very often are rather harmful. This critique can easily be justified with logical and rational arguments. But does this mean we just have to throw them overboard, and deny that they are fundamental to the possibility of a ‘good life’?
Well, I know it sounds derogatory, but I actually feel very sorry for Rosenberg: he is clearly someone who can only think in binary (scientific or non-scientific) terms, and as a result simply wishes to ignore fundamental parts of human reality. I’m not saying this book isn’t interesting (it absolutely is thought provoking), and I’m not saying Rosenberg is wrong all the time, but his central message just is wrong to the core.
In my historical account on Goodreads, I explore more in depth the (ir)relevance of this book for historians: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Since the postmodern wave in the second half of the twentieth century, we know that narratives are ubiquitous; we use the frame of stories to interpret and express both the banal reality of everyday as well as fundamental issues; “everything is a story” has become a very inflationary expression. Well, says Rosenberg, these narratives just are bullshit, and what's more, they're harmful: “all narratives are wrong – wrong in the same way and for the same reason”.
To prove his point, he elaborates on the ‘Theory of Mind’-technique, that is the instrument we use to assume how other people function, what their motives and desires are. It’s a method that homo sapiens has developed throughout its evolutionary history, and that allowed it to survive. It was such a success that we have completely internalized, and still use it throughout the day. According to Rosenberg this development has come with a vengeance. Through a very detailed and technical overview of neuro-cognitive studies, he shows that this Theory of Mind constantly misleads us; because there’s no way we can be sure we’re on the right track of motives and desires of others, and that’s why we constantly make bad choices. If we have to believe Rosenberg, neurosciences have proven that this instrument makes no sense, it even has no neurological basis at all.
The only remedy according to Rosenberg is to renounce our addiction to narratives, and resolutely turn to science, through the simple registration of events and actions, sticking to factual information and expressing that in tables, graphs, etc. It’s no wonder Rosenberg ventures into a rehabilitation of the long-discredited behaviorism.
Look, I could demonstrate extensively how fundamentally wrong Rosenberg is. But I’m going to limit myself to two points of criticism. To begin with, Rosenberg is purely misleading: if you read carefully, his critique of (historical) narratives focuses almost exclusively on the process of attributing motives and desires to others (hence his focus on the Theory of Mind); that is a serious limitation of the concept of narrative. Isn’t it strange that an intelligent person like Rosenberg does not even notice that he is constantly using narratives (in the broader sense of the word) himself, almost constantly throughout this book. How could it be different: they’re ubiquitous, remember?
And secondly, his scientism is so out of line (“science and nothing but science”) that he simply ignores entire chunks of (human) reality. Try this exercise: replace the ‘Theory of Mind’-method with 'friendship' or 'love', two other forms of human relating; it is quite simple to show that friendship and love in many cases are just illusions, are neuro-cognitive based on nothing, and very often are rather harmful. This critique can easily be justified with logical and rational arguments. But does this mean we just have to throw them overboard, and deny that they are fundamental to the possibility of a ‘good life’?
Well, I know it sounds derogatory, but I actually feel very sorry for Rosenberg: he is clearly someone who can only think in binary (scientific or non-scientific) terms, and as a result simply wishes to ignore fundamental parts of human reality. I’m not saying this book isn’t interesting (it absolutely is thought provoking), and I’m not saying Rosenberg is wrong all the time, but his central message just is wrong to the core.
In my historical account on Goodreads, I explore more in depth the (ir)relevance of this book for historians: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
December 4, 2018
As a novelist and editor, I need to be hip to the subtleties and not-so-subtleties of stories and storytelling as humanity’s oldest, fastest, and strongest means of communicating complex ideas and their concomitant emotions. So when I heard about a new book that singles out our addiction to stories as the villain of historical accounts and analysis, I had to read it.
I soon realized that Rosenberg’s point isn’t news to fiction writers (though perhaps would be to fiction readers). We already know that a story isn’t a depiction of real life nor put together the same way but is a concentrated elixir that looks, smells, and tastes like real life but makes more sense and delivers more meaning. So of course, if you convert history to stories, as is done in many books and all elementary and secondary schools, it’s all going to make satisfying Aesopic sense but bear little resemblance to what really happened or why. Similarly, many so-called experts in the human mind, from meditation masters to Freudian psychoanalysts, have learned the hard way that a neat explanation for one’s trials and difficulties is a profoundly beautiful, moving thing but quaintly irrelevant at best and generally untrue and misleading. When false explanations from narrative history are used to guide international relations, often a lot of people die.
The fallacy of narrative history soon becomes apparent. The explanation for many events hinges on the motives of the key players. The historian examines all the available information and comes to a plausible hypothesis as to why things happened. She crafts a compelling narrative based on it. We readers, suckers for a good story, lap it up and believe it. But then another historian does the same thing, except with a different hypothesis presented as fact. Ultimately, it’s impossible to know the motives of the individuals involved, even if we have clear statements from them, because none of us truly knows why we do things and all of us sometimes lie. Rosenberg is making a case for a more objective, less narrative-based study of history. I know, it sounds logical but sort of boring. After all, we often accept what’s explicitly historical fiction as probable fact. We don’t want the truth, we want something that gives us cognitive and emotional gratification.
His thesis about the fallacy of narrative history is one of those clarion ideas that we haven’t thought of before but which seem obvious almost as soon as they are stated. The problem with this book is that his point becomes lucidly inescapable in the first couple of short chapters, and then he spends the rest of the book still trying to prove it.
Rosenberg drills down to a key element in both storytelling and real life, and stays with it for most of the book. Theory of mind is our more or less innate faculty for trying to predict what other people will or won’t do. It seems to consist in varying proportions of knowledge, experience, hearsay, intuition, desires, fears, and what can seem like ESP. We rely on it constantly, almost unconsciously. And, most of us can admit, it’s often wrong. Historians reverse the process in hindsight: knowing what someone did, they try to figure out why.
Scientists and philosophers have boiled down theory of mind to a sort of flowchart. Much of book dwells on showing, in some detail and with much repetition, how theory of mind must be wrong because neural processes do not and cannot represent such abstract qualities as the knowledge and desires of others. His main point isn’t only that narrative history cannot be reliable because it “attributes causal responsibility for the historical record to factors inaccessible to the historian.” I think he takes a step too far when he goes on to say that those factors are “inaccessible because they don’t exist.” I didn’t find his argument persuasive. It’s certainly logical that larger, longer-term geographical, climatic, political, economic, and social trends are far more observable, documentable, relevant, and reliable, but that doesn’t mean that the desires and fears of individual leaders didn’t play a part even if we can’t yet know what they were. Rosenberg wants to “banish purpose” from history. But why? Surely purpose plays a role in human affairs even if on a small scale. Is such an all-or-nothing approach needed? One doesn’t want to anthropomorphize nature, but human beings arrive already anthropomorphized.
A missing element in his analysis would seem to be complexity. As a system becomes more complex, it often displays characteristics that were not, and could not have been, predicted by its earlier configuration. An exhaustive examination of hydrogen and oxygen atoms would not come up with a description of a snowflake, but that doesn’t mean snowflakes don’t exist. A brain, which at a microscopic level is made up of neurons stimulating one another, might at a higher level produce what we experience as a theory-of-mind flowchart. The author even suggests such a level, language, in which a particular sound, which does carry a representation, even of an abstraction, can be mechanistically produced, perceived, processed by the brain, and responded to. I doubt anyone ever took theory of mind, even with its flowcharts, to be a literal neurological process rather than just a model of how we second-guess our predators, prey, enemies, friends, and potential mates. A more scientific theory would have to be much more mechanistic. But just because we can’t yet see a neurological basis for abstract thought doesn’t mean we should write off the whole concept. If in fact we don’t think in abstractions, then how can we believe we do, a fact proven by this book’s existence?
When he returns, in later chapters, to addressing the perils of using theory of mind to analyze history, the book finds its stride again with vivid examples.
This often fascinating and insightful book has a vital message about the fallacies and dangers of narrative histories as, among other things, motivators and justifications for genocide, slavery, and war. It would have been even better if it had received the editorial attention it deserves, from organization and proportion right down to proofreading. Which is a shame, since this is an important book, not just for historians and writers but for anyone who reads them.
I soon realized that Rosenberg’s point isn’t news to fiction writers (though perhaps would be to fiction readers). We already know that a story isn’t a depiction of real life nor put together the same way but is a concentrated elixir that looks, smells, and tastes like real life but makes more sense and delivers more meaning. So of course, if you convert history to stories, as is done in many books and all elementary and secondary schools, it’s all going to make satisfying Aesopic sense but bear little resemblance to what really happened or why. Similarly, many so-called experts in the human mind, from meditation masters to Freudian psychoanalysts, have learned the hard way that a neat explanation for one’s trials and difficulties is a profoundly beautiful, moving thing but quaintly irrelevant at best and generally untrue and misleading. When false explanations from narrative history are used to guide international relations, often a lot of people die.
The fallacy of narrative history soon becomes apparent. The explanation for many events hinges on the motives of the key players. The historian examines all the available information and comes to a plausible hypothesis as to why things happened. She crafts a compelling narrative based on it. We readers, suckers for a good story, lap it up and believe it. But then another historian does the same thing, except with a different hypothesis presented as fact. Ultimately, it’s impossible to know the motives of the individuals involved, even if we have clear statements from them, because none of us truly knows why we do things and all of us sometimes lie. Rosenberg is making a case for a more objective, less narrative-based study of history. I know, it sounds logical but sort of boring. After all, we often accept what’s explicitly historical fiction as probable fact. We don’t want the truth, we want something that gives us cognitive and emotional gratification.
His thesis about the fallacy of narrative history is one of those clarion ideas that we haven’t thought of before but which seem obvious almost as soon as they are stated. The problem with this book is that his point becomes lucidly inescapable in the first couple of short chapters, and then he spends the rest of the book still trying to prove it.
Rosenberg drills down to a key element in both storytelling and real life, and stays with it for most of the book. Theory of mind is our more or less innate faculty for trying to predict what other people will or won’t do. It seems to consist in varying proportions of knowledge, experience, hearsay, intuition, desires, fears, and what can seem like ESP. We rely on it constantly, almost unconsciously. And, most of us can admit, it’s often wrong. Historians reverse the process in hindsight: knowing what someone did, they try to figure out why.
Scientists and philosophers have boiled down theory of mind to a sort of flowchart. Much of book dwells on showing, in some detail and with much repetition, how theory of mind must be wrong because neural processes do not and cannot represent such abstract qualities as the knowledge and desires of others. His main point isn’t only that narrative history cannot be reliable because it “attributes causal responsibility for the historical record to factors inaccessible to the historian.” I think he takes a step too far when he goes on to say that those factors are “inaccessible because they don’t exist.” I didn’t find his argument persuasive. It’s certainly logical that larger, longer-term geographical, climatic, political, economic, and social trends are far more observable, documentable, relevant, and reliable, but that doesn’t mean that the desires and fears of individual leaders didn’t play a part even if we can’t yet know what they were. Rosenberg wants to “banish purpose” from history. But why? Surely purpose plays a role in human affairs even if on a small scale. Is such an all-or-nothing approach needed? One doesn’t want to anthropomorphize nature, but human beings arrive already anthropomorphized.
A missing element in his analysis would seem to be complexity. As a system becomes more complex, it often displays characteristics that were not, and could not have been, predicted by its earlier configuration. An exhaustive examination of hydrogen and oxygen atoms would not come up with a description of a snowflake, but that doesn’t mean snowflakes don’t exist. A brain, which at a microscopic level is made up of neurons stimulating one another, might at a higher level produce what we experience as a theory-of-mind flowchart. The author even suggests such a level, language, in which a particular sound, which does carry a representation, even of an abstraction, can be mechanistically produced, perceived, processed by the brain, and responded to. I doubt anyone ever took theory of mind, even with its flowcharts, to be a literal neurological process rather than just a model of how we second-guess our predators, prey, enemies, friends, and potential mates. A more scientific theory would have to be much more mechanistic. But just because we can’t yet see a neurological basis for abstract thought doesn’t mean we should write off the whole concept. If in fact we don’t think in abstractions, then how can we believe we do, a fact proven by this book’s existence?
When he returns, in later chapters, to addressing the perils of using theory of mind to analyze history, the book finds its stride again with vivid examples.
This often fascinating and insightful book has a vital message about the fallacies and dangers of narrative histories as, among other things, motivators and justifications for genocide, slavery, and war. It would have been even better if it had received the editorial attention it deserves, from organization and proportion right down to proofreading. Which is a shame, since this is an important book, not just for historians and writers but for anyone who reads them.
Read
October 21, 2024Rating 2 stars. The central thesis of this book (“all narratives are bullshit, only science counts”) is fairly easy to punctuate (see my review in my general account on Goodreads: here). In this review I will specifically indicate what this book means for historical studies, because these are the central subject of Rosenberg.
“History is definitely entertaining. It gives us too much pleasure (along with a host of other emotions and feelings). But that's just another symptom of the problem narrative history faces as a source of knowledge and another reason it's a dangerous substitute for knowledge.” There you are, loud and clear: historical narratives are unreliable, and even dangerous.
Sure, Rosenberg is partially right. Historical narratives often contradict each other, even on the same subject (even after 100 years very contradictory studies are still published on the causes of World War I); so he's right: they don't offer THE truth. Moreover, historical narratives do not allow to make reliable predictions about the future; absolutely correct. Thirdly: they can be dangerous, because they can be abused by anyone (ultranationalists bend history to their will); that too is a fact. And narratives in general impose a straitjacket on reality (from a well-defined beginning to a well-defined end, with a bit of drama and suspense and wrapped in beautiful tropes); these are all things that we know all too well since the linguistic turn of the 1980s.
So, you can certainly not say that this book is completely nonsense. But if you read Rosenberg carefully, it turns out that he narrows historical narratives down to those that explain history on the basis of the motives and desires of historical actors (for example, why Hitler declared war on America at the end of 1941). The author thus sticks to an approach to history that has become largely obsolete: motives and desires of historical actors naturally play a role in historical studies (and it is indeed very difficult to estimate these correctly), but these are usually embedded in a much broader context, with an eye for processes and structures that transcend those actors. Even in more vulgar works, the days of the "Big Men" history are long behind us.
For Rosenberg we have to renounce narratives in the study of history. He only sees salvation in a purely scientific approach. Namely by understanding human cultural phenomena in a Darwinian sense, in other words, blind evolutionary processes as 'the real history'. It may be logical when you see his aversion to ascribing motives and desires to other people, but whether he will really be able to grasp the "soul" of history in this way seems very doubtful to me. Narratives (in the broad sense of the word) have their limitations, and they even pose a risk, sure, but can we do without? It may be to Rosenberg's credit to remind us of those limitations and risks, but his scientistic alternative is no good. Could it be that that is because life, well, just is life? Complex and quirky? I'm afraid people like Rosenberg, blinded by scientism, are never going to see that.
“History is definitely entertaining. It gives us too much pleasure (along with a host of other emotions and feelings). But that's just another symptom of the problem narrative history faces as a source of knowledge and another reason it's a dangerous substitute for knowledge.” There you are, loud and clear: historical narratives are unreliable, and even dangerous.
Sure, Rosenberg is partially right. Historical narratives often contradict each other, even on the same subject (even after 100 years very contradictory studies are still published on the causes of World War I); so he's right: they don't offer THE truth. Moreover, historical narratives do not allow to make reliable predictions about the future; absolutely correct. Thirdly: they can be dangerous, because they can be abused by anyone (ultranationalists bend history to their will); that too is a fact. And narratives in general impose a straitjacket on reality (from a well-defined beginning to a well-defined end, with a bit of drama and suspense and wrapped in beautiful tropes); these are all things that we know all too well since the linguistic turn of the 1980s.
So, you can certainly not say that this book is completely nonsense. But if you read Rosenberg carefully, it turns out that he narrows historical narratives down to those that explain history on the basis of the motives and desires of historical actors (for example, why Hitler declared war on America at the end of 1941). The author thus sticks to an approach to history that has become largely obsolete: motives and desires of historical actors naturally play a role in historical studies (and it is indeed very difficult to estimate these correctly), but these are usually embedded in a much broader context, with an eye for processes and structures that transcend those actors. Even in more vulgar works, the days of the "Big Men" history are long behind us.
For Rosenberg we have to renounce narratives in the study of history. He only sees salvation in a purely scientific approach. Namely by understanding human cultural phenomena in a Darwinian sense, in other words, blind evolutionary processes as 'the real history'. It may be logical when you see his aversion to ascribing motives and desires to other people, but whether he will really be able to grasp the "soul" of history in this way seems very doubtful to me. Narratives (in the broad sense of the word) have their limitations, and they even pose a risk, sure, but can we do without? It may be to Rosenberg's credit to remind us of those limitations and risks, but his scientistic alternative is no good. Could it be that that is because life, well, just is life? Complex and quirky? I'm afraid people like Rosenberg, blinded by scientism, are never going to see that.
April 3, 2019
A rather tiresome book--not only b/c there is a LOT of repetition within the book, about why belief/desire explanations are flawed, but also because this song has been sung for well over 30 years. I was in the Philosophy Department at UCSD when the Churchlands joined, and this story was their theme. Pat C. published Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/Brain in 1986. In fact, in a talk in the department in 1984, Paul C. proclaimed that within 20 years our folk psychology will have died away, replaced by a new neuropsychological language. Needless to say, that hasn't happened. And Rosenberg admits that he can't even see how it could happen.
The attack on historical explanation is NOT the centerpiece of the book, the attack on belief/desire psychological explanation is. There are a number of historical scenarios considered, but the moral is always, over and over, that such explanations are not definitive and cannot be predictive. That is mostly the point. But near the end there are two examples of alternate historical explanations that are considered successful. One is Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, and the other has to do with foot-binding. These are interesting, in that they are based on evolutionary and game-theoretic factors. I also have especially enjoyed Axelrod's book The Evolution of Cooperation, which the author might have invoked as well. But the problem is that the author never shows that this evolutionary approach can be definitive and predictive either. We are led to suppose they take a superior approach, but that is never shown.
So, the author's thesis that belief/desire explanations can't be true may be right, but he doesn't show anything in its place.
The attack on historical explanation is NOT the centerpiece of the book, the attack on belief/desire psychological explanation is. There are a number of historical scenarios considered, but the moral is always, over and over, that such explanations are not definitive and cannot be predictive. That is mostly the point. But near the end there are two examples of alternate historical explanations that are considered successful. One is Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, and the other has to do with foot-binding. These are interesting, in that they are based on evolutionary and game-theoretic factors. I also have especially enjoyed Axelrod's book The Evolution of Cooperation, which the author might have invoked as well. But the problem is that the author never shows that this evolutionary approach can be definitive and predictive either. We are led to suppose they take a superior approach, but that is never shown.
So, the author's thesis that belief/desire explanations can't be true may be right, but he doesn't show anything in its place.
December 29, 2018
This is a silly book: silly exactly because it assumes its reductionist brand of evolutionary materialism to be universally explanatory and sufficient. It is a case study in the ideational trap of objectivity that leads to scientism - and, sadly, fails to observe its own limitations, whether in logic (by evidencing discernment about the ways in which histories are told), understanding (the book itself *is* a set of stories, a history...), humility (through reading the philosophy of history), or even simple pragmatism. To boldly proclaim that "Stories historians tell are deeply implicated in more misery and death than probably any other aspect of human culture" is an exercise in more than hubris - it is simply silly. To entertain the hopelessly pop-science notion of neuroscience as an explanatory aid in the fashion of the subtitle alone is a klaxon-clear warning to the reader: as any neuroscientist will warn, steer clear of popular "the neuroscience of..." texts, especially those written by non-neuroscientists (which include the author of this book) and those written by the fetishists of scientism.
In the end, this book cannot see the forest or the trees, but it is more than willing to start a logging industry. MIT Press should be embarrassed. I have an enormous amount of time for the critique of narrative, of history, of stories. Yet by my standards, even judging this with a sympathetic eye, this book has little of value - only an eternity of misleading confidence and a plethora of stupid assumptions and conclusions. Don't waste your time.
In the end, this book cannot see the forest or the trees, but it is more than willing to start a logging industry. MIT Press should be embarrassed. I have an enormous amount of time for the critique of narrative, of history, of stories. Yet by my standards, even judging this with a sympathetic eye, this book has little of value - only an eternity of misleading confidence and a plethora of stupid assumptions and conclusions. Don't waste your time.
Read
July 13, 2025There are two very good things about this book. The first is that there's interesting stuff throughout, with I assume (same as he grants to the historical works he decries) accurate enough statement of the facts. The second is that the core thesis is charmingly deranged. Don't take that as a swipe: a thesis can be charmingly deranged without being false or supported by poor arguments; if you have good arguments for a facially bonkers position, then your book is very good indeed. But you can also get points in my book just for propounding such a position - like, say, that people do not have beliefs and desires about anything, and (lest one be accused of mere semantics) "there is not anything like such things" - and letting me live in that world for a while.
Alas, the core thesis is supported by rather poor arguments, and these arguments are (I accuse) mere semantics. Here's the broader, wrapper argument:
1) Popular narrative histories' basic claims are about the beliefs and goals individuals in the past had.
2) But people don't have beliefs or goals.
3) So popular narrative histories aren't even truth-apt.
Two things to note about this argument. One is that it's perfectly valid (or would be with slight rephrasing,) and that its soundness depends on the truth of (2). The other is that it's just really funny to blast such a narrow target out of the water with such an all-encompassing theory. It's like launching a nuclear weapon to win a boxing match. (Perhaps I ought have read Rosenberg's "Atheist's Guide to Reality," which is more like launching nukes at a rival superpower - just as self-destructive in the end but way less funny.)
So, then - do the nuclear weapons launch? Are dad histories, Rosenberg's own works, and this review - or at any rate any human understanding of or intentionality behind them - all collectively annihilated? No. The payload in the warheads is confetti labelled "you have been hit by an atomic bomb (bomb made of atoms.)" Rosenberg says again and again that "neuroscience" demolishes the idea that humans have beliefs that are about anything, desires about what anything might be, or take intentional actions based on the former to make the world more like the latter - and he even goes into quite a bit of interesting neuroscience! For instance, did you know that when rats learn a maze, they form a bunch of neuronal clusters that link together in a form isomorphic to a hexmap of the maze?
Now, if you were an absolute fool, says Rosenberg - and here's the argument that, as best I can tell, does all the work - you might not just call these neuronal networks a "hexmap" in the sense of that's what they would look like if you diagrammed them, but the rat's "internal map" of the territory (which is exactly how the scientists who discovered it describe it.) But you simpleton! Text and road signs have meaning because people assign meaning to them. And a literal map? Well (and I believe this is all he says about literal maps) the same thing applies to the symbols in the legend, Paris being shown as the capital of France being conventionally represented with an encircled star. But who ascribes meaning to the rat's supposed internal map (leaving aside scientists, who only investigate a small number of such structures, and have only done so lately?) The rat? Ah, but this is the part of the rat that "knows" this. So all these neural networks and patterns of firing are just completely meaningless random firings of electrical currents, that just so happen to guide evolutionarily fit behavior in environments sufficiently like the mursine environment of evolutionary adaptation. And since the human brain is more-or-less just a scaled-up version of the rat brain, and there is no extraphysical element to the human mind, everything in the supposed human mind is just a meaningless electrochemical jumble; nobody believes anything, or wants anything, or acts intentionally with means-ends rationality.
That the human brain is more-or-less just a scaled-up version of the rat brain is something that sounds perfectly plausible; I'm happy to accept Rosenberg's reports that neuroscience has confirmed it, and that mutatis mutandis what applies to rats at any sort of deep metaphysical level applies to us and other great apes. Likewise physicalism. My nuke-in-boxing-match analogy works, if it does work, because of an underlying structural similarity. If Rosenberg replied to my nuke in a boxing match analogy, and said "actually, it's not self-destructive, my book and this sentence claim (even if I don't and can't believe) that socially embedded utterances have meaning, just that no meaning exists in brains - you might say, or rather utter, that it's more like a neutron bomb that annihilates me but leaves my technomilitary apparatus intact to kill again" he's presumably grasping (and contesting) the supposed structural similarities of the metaphor.
Likewise a map. If someone from an alternate timeline (diverging from our several thousand years ago, perhaps) made a physical map of North America with none of our particular conventions, we could probably recognize it as such, because in order to be useful it would have to structurally correspond to the real landmass - even if particular symbols, or indeed the construct "North America" (what exactly does it include?) are arbitrary conventions. In a pocket calculator, which squiggles represent which numbers or operations, and the choice of base ten, are conventional, but if I gave you a working pocket calculator from the alternate timeline, you would (given sufficient time and curiosity) be able to figure out what those symbols really did mean, because the internal workings would be isomorphic to arithmetic. In drawing metaphors with other things that represent, Rosenberg only ever engages with those whose meaning is entirely arbitrary and socially conventional - such as the meaning of stop signs or political capital markers - and never calculators, the two-dimensional relationships on maps, photography, or making fun of people with exagerrated versions of themselves. What the rat map neuroscience seems to evince to me is that the soul is a mirror of the world. The maze has its (imperfect) double in the (entirely physical, like our own) soul of the rat.
I don't want to commit myself too deeply to any particular claims about philosophy of language here, because philosophy of language is so deeply boring, much less neuroscience, on which I'm a complete ignoramus and the most enlivening thing I have to say is "cool! rat souls!" But from cultural osmosis, my understanding is that Rosenberg is something of a mereological nihilist as well. Why not just go that route? "This dad history claims to talk about Shackleton's fatefold voyage in the Arctic. But actually, there is no Artic in the first place - only simples arranged Arcticwise. The dad history, therefore, is not even wrong."
So arguendo I'm happy to speak in terms of "dispositions arranged beliefwise" and "dispositions arranged desirewise." Rosenberg's claims that "there is nothing like" beliefs or desires would seem to exclude these as well, and sometimes he makes gestures towards this. This is rather more like "this dad history claims to sequence the events leading up to the First World War, but the Theory of Relativity has established there is no absolute order of events" - no longer merely linguistic, but very difficult to defend as both true and relevant at salient scope of discourse (i.e., events on Earth.) Relativity shows that no absolute ordering of events exists between events outside each others' lightcones; but more or less all events on Earth have been inside each others' lightcones. Rosenberg says at various junctures that people don't engage in intentional action at all but only on the basis of operant conditioning, which would indeed disprove any dispositions arranged beliefwise or desirewise, or behavior arranged actionwise. But he also says that the project of the midcentury behaviorists failed because they didn't have the evidence of neuroscience, and, well, if people didn't really have these functionally *-like dispositions it would show up somewhere in the macro-scale evidence. (If you're middle-aged like me, you may still remember a brief time when "meme" meant something other than templated images with superimposed impact font substituting for real thought; this evolution-flavored program that aimed to replace folk psychology with something more supposedly scientific fizzled out far more pathetically than behaviorism did.) Rosenberg could have offered completely fair quibbles like people's propensity to confabulate different beliefs based on the framing of the question, or to have non-transitive preferences in experimental settings, places where the folk psychological framing of beliefs and desires breaks down, but this would still seem to leave a lot of scope for things that are rather something like B&D.
The language of the book does not hesitate to assume what it sets out to prove; aiming as it does to disabuse us of a supposedly substantially false belief that we have beliefs, and so on. Rosenberg is not unaware of this and often writes as if it is just a tic we can't get away from because our subconscious is so committed to framing things this way (something that sure looks like a disposition arranged beliefwise.) But the idea of intentional, goal-oriented action is all over all social-scientific history, not just dad history, even if dad history is much more conspicuously concerned with the particular intentional choices of particular people as the main event. As an example of history done right, he cites a game-theoretic explanation of foot-binding in China. Emperors initially bound the feet of concubines to reduce their chances of sleeping around, executing an evolved male strategy of mate-guarding; this spread down the ranks of the social classes until everyone but the very poorest (who needed their daughters to work) did it, which sucked for everyone, because if you were looking out for your daughter's marriage prospects it would be best to bind her feet to signal that you weren't so poor, but then collectively all the daughters are doing just as well in the zero-sum marriage market except they can't walk straight and are in pain; except when Christian missionaries and insisted on not doing it there was a sufficient portion of the marriage market that chose to opt out which led to a preference cascade where everyone stopped. Okay, cool, plausible enough, let's accept this. It implicitly depends on beliefs, desires, and intentional action all over!
1a) Was the initial emperor mate-guarding because human males evolved to be super jealous, and so he found this a way to control concubines? Then we have evolved but real desires, presumably the belief that foot-bound concubines have fewer opportunities elsewhere, and so on.
1b) Or is it that a random variation in cultural practice resulted in the foot-binding, which then had higher fitness because it resulted in more secure paternity? But the fitness of cultural practices doesn't have anything to do with genetic paternity (except insofar as humans are desiring to ensure it.) Rosenberg surely knows this, but seems to talk as if this is the explanation.
1c) Or was it a random variation in genetics? That would explain its having greater fitness without intentionality from anyone, but the timescales of its spread and even faster timescale of its demise tell against it.
2a) Are parents binding their daughters' feet because they have a belief that it will increase their marriage prospects, and the desire to so increase them? That, uh, sure looks like a classical belief-desire-action framework.
2b) Or are they binding their daughters' feet because they see higher-status people doing it and have an evolved or operant conditioned tendency to ape the behavior of their superiors? Then don't they at least need the belief that foot-binding results in tiny, aristocratic-looking feet - or are they simply aping examples of the foot-binding process itself without regard for whether it results in the tiny feet themselves? Why do the poorest citizens refrain from binding their daughters' feet, if the aping is entirely mindless rather than invoking means-ends reasoning?
3) Why do Christian missionaries have moral objections to some Chinese cultural practices, like foot-binding, while thinking others are super-cool and should be imported to Europe, like state examinations?
...and so on.
Rosenberg says at the beginning he means to demolish only dad ("narrative") history, not academic history. And academic history is indeed quite different, is indeed quite dissatisfied with dad history's preoccupation with the particular decisions of great men, and seeks to emphasize structural factors. It is only with such structural factors that we can explain the patterns of history; rather than just one damn thing (or decision) after another. But in the background you will invariably find means-ends rationality.
Alas, the core thesis is supported by rather poor arguments, and these arguments are (I accuse) mere semantics. Here's the broader, wrapper argument:
1) Popular narrative histories' basic claims are about the beliefs and goals individuals in the past had.
2) But people don't have beliefs or goals.
3) So popular narrative histories aren't even truth-apt.
Two things to note about this argument. One is that it's perfectly valid (or would be with slight rephrasing,) and that its soundness depends on the truth of (2). The other is that it's just really funny to blast such a narrow target out of the water with such an all-encompassing theory. It's like launching a nuclear weapon to win a boxing match. (Perhaps I ought have read Rosenberg's "Atheist's Guide to Reality," which is more like launching nukes at a rival superpower - just as self-destructive in the end but way less funny.)
So, then - do the nuclear weapons launch? Are dad histories, Rosenberg's own works, and this review - or at any rate any human understanding of or intentionality behind them - all collectively annihilated? No. The payload in the warheads is confetti labelled "you have been hit by an atomic bomb (bomb made of atoms.)" Rosenberg says again and again that "neuroscience" demolishes the idea that humans have beliefs that are about anything, desires about what anything might be, or take intentional actions based on the former to make the world more like the latter - and he even goes into quite a bit of interesting neuroscience! For instance, did you know that when rats learn a maze, they form a bunch of neuronal clusters that link together in a form isomorphic to a hexmap of the maze?
Now, if you were an absolute fool, says Rosenberg - and here's the argument that, as best I can tell, does all the work - you might not just call these neuronal networks a "hexmap" in the sense of that's what they would look like if you diagrammed them, but the rat's "internal map" of the territory (which is exactly how the scientists who discovered it describe it.) But you simpleton! Text and road signs have meaning because people assign meaning to them. And a literal map? Well (and I believe this is all he says about literal maps) the same thing applies to the symbols in the legend, Paris being shown as the capital of France being conventionally represented with an encircled star. But who ascribes meaning to the rat's supposed internal map (leaving aside scientists, who only investigate a small number of such structures, and have only done so lately?) The rat? Ah, but this is the part of the rat that "knows" this. So all these neural networks and patterns of firing are just completely meaningless random firings of electrical currents, that just so happen to guide evolutionarily fit behavior in environments sufficiently like the mursine environment of evolutionary adaptation. And since the human brain is more-or-less just a scaled-up version of the rat brain, and there is no extraphysical element to the human mind, everything in the supposed human mind is just a meaningless electrochemical jumble; nobody believes anything, or wants anything, or acts intentionally with means-ends rationality.
That the human brain is more-or-less just a scaled-up version of the rat brain is something that sounds perfectly plausible; I'm happy to accept Rosenberg's reports that neuroscience has confirmed it, and that mutatis mutandis what applies to rats at any sort of deep metaphysical level applies to us and other great apes. Likewise physicalism. My nuke-in-boxing-match analogy works, if it does work, because of an underlying structural similarity. If Rosenberg replied to my nuke in a boxing match analogy, and said "actually, it's not self-destructive, my book and this sentence claim (even if I don't and can't believe) that socially embedded utterances have meaning, just that no meaning exists in brains - you might say, or rather utter, that it's more like a neutron bomb that annihilates me but leaves my technomilitary apparatus intact to kill again" he's presumably grasping (and contesting) the supposed structural similarities of the metaphor.
Likewise a map. If someone from an alternate timeline (diverging from our several thousand years ago, perhaps) made a physical map of North America with none of our particular conventions, we could probably recognize it as such, because in order to be useful it would have to structurally correspond to the real landmass - even if particular symbols, or indeed the construct "North America" (what exactly does it include?) are arbitrary conventions. In a pocket calculator, which squiggles represent which numbers or operations, and the choice of base ten, are conventional, but if I gave you a working pocket calculator from the alternate timeline, you would (given sufficient time and curiosity) be able to figure out what those symbols really did mean, because the internal workings would be isomorphic to arithmetic. In drawing metaphors with other things that represent, Rosenberg only ever engages with those whose meaning is entirely arbitrary and socially conventional - such as the meaning of stop signs or political capital markers - and never calculators, the two-dimensional relationships on maps, photography, or making fun of people with exagerrated versions of themselves. What the rat map neuroscience seems to evince to me is that the soul is a mirror of the world. The maze has its (imperfect) double in the (entirely physical, like our own) soul of the rat.
I don't want to commit myself too deeply to any particular claims about philosophy of language here, because philosophy of language is so deeply boring, much less neuroscience, on which I'm a complete ignoramus and the most enlivening thing I have to say is "cool! rat souls!" But from cultural osmosis, my understanding is that Rosenberg is something of a mereological nihilist as well. Why not just go that route? "This dad history claims to talk about Shackleton's fatefold voyage in the Arctic. But actually, there is no Artic in the first place - only simples arranged Arcticwise. The dad history, therefore, is not even wrong."
So arguendo I'm happy to speak in terms of "dispositions arranged beliefwise" and "dispositions arranged desirewise." Rosenberg's claims that "there is nothing like" beliefs or desires would seem to exclude these as well, and sometimes he makes gestures towards this. This is rather more like "this dad history claims to sequence the events leading up to the First World War, but the Theory of Relativity has established there is no absolute order of events" - no longer merely linguistic, but very difficult to defend as both true and relevant at salient scope of discourse (i.e., events on Earth.) Relativity shows that no absolute ordering of events exists between events outside each others' lightcones; but more or less all events on Earth have been inside each others' lightcones. Rosenberg says at various junctures that people don't engage in intentional action at all but only on the basis of operant conditioning, which would indeed disprove any dispositions arranged beliefwise or desirewise, or behavior arranged actionwise. But he also says that the project of the midcentury behaviorists failed because they didn't have the evidence of neuroscience, and, well, if people didn't really have these functionally *-like dispositions it would show up somewhere in the macro-scale evidence. (If you're middle-aged like me, you may still remember a brief time when "meme" meant something other than templated images with superimposed impact font substituting for real thought; this evolution-flavored program that aimed to replace folk psychology with something more supposedly scientific fizzled out far more pathetically than behaviorism did.) Rosenberg could have offered completely fair quibbles like people's propensity to confabulate different beliefs based on the framing of the question, or to have non-transitive preferences in experimental settings, places where the folk psychological framing of beliefs and desires breaks down, but this would still seem to leave a lot of scope for things that are rather something like B&D.
The language of the book does not hesitate to assume what it sets out to prove; aiming as it does to disabuse us of a supposedly substantially false belief that we have beliefs, and so on. Rosenberg is not unaware of this and often writes as if it is just a tic we can't get away from because our subconscious is so committed to framing things this way (something that sure looks like a disposition arranged beliefwise.) But the idea of intentional, goal-oriented action is all over all social-scientific history, not just dad history, even if dad history is much more conspicuously concerned with the particular intentional choices of particular people as the main event. As an example of history done right, he cites a game-theoretic explanation of foot-binding in China. Emperors initially bound the feet of concubines to reduce their chances of sleeping around, executing an evolved male strategy of mate-guarding; this spread down the ranks of the social classes until everyone but the very poorest (who needed their daughters to work) did it, which sucked for everyone, because if you were looking out for your daughter's marriage prospects it would be best to bind her feet to signal that you weren't so poor, but then collectively all the daughters are doing just as well in the zero-sum marriage market except they can't walk straight and are in pain; except when Christian missionaries and insisted on not doing it there was a sufficient portion of the marriage market that chose to opt out which led to a preference cascade where everyone stopped. Okay, cool, plausible enough, let's accept this. It implicitly depends on beliefs, desires, and intentional action all over!
1a) Was the initial emperor mate-guarding because human males evolved to be super jealous, and so he found this a way to control concubines? Then we have evolved but real desires, presumably the belief that foot-bound concubines have fewer opportunities elsewhere, and so on.
1b) Or is it that a random variation in cultural practice resulted in the foot-binding, which then had higher fitness because it resulted in more secure paternity? But the fitness of cultural practices doesn't have anything to do with genetic paternity (except insofar as humans are desiring to ensure it.) Rosenberg surely knows this, but seems to talk as if this is the explanation.
1c) Or was it a random variation in genetics? That would explain its having greater fitness without intentionality from anyone, but the timescales of its spread and even faster timescale of its demise tell against it.
2a) Are parents binding their daughters' feet because they have a belief that it will increase their marriage prospects, and the desire to so increase them? That, uh, sure looks like a classical belief-desire-action framework.
2b) Or are they binding their daughters' feet because they see higher-status people doing it and have an evolved or operant conditioned tendency to ape the behavior of their superiors? Then don't they at least need the belief that foot-binding results in tiny, aristocratic-looking feet - or are they simply aping examples of the foot-binding process itself without regard for whether it results in the tiny feet themselves? Why do the poorest citizens refrain from binding their daughters' feet, if the aping is entirely mindless rather than invoking means-ends reasoning?
3) Why do Christian missionaries have moral objections to some Chinese cultural practices, like foot-binding, while thinking others are super-cool and should be imported to Europe, like state examinations?
...and so on.
Rosenberg says at the beginning he means to demolish only dad ("narrative") history, not academic history. And academic history is indeed quite different, is indeed quite dissatisfied with dad history's preoccupation with the particular decisions of great men, and seeks to emphasize structural factors. It is only with such structural factors that we can explain the patterns of history; rather than just one damn thing (or decision) after another. But in the background you will invariably find means-ends rationality.
January 13, 2020
This may be the most significant book of recent time. It is a wholesale de rezzing of storytelling, exposing its - our weaknesses as partners in our mutual doom in cause and effect. A powerful refutation of Aristotle and Descartes, and an innumerable amount of upvotes of a spectrum of thinkers, proves Churchland w/o subscribing to the full eliminatavist program, while chucking the concept of mind wholesale. No small feat. The intuitive conversion of place cells to 'place' cells in the central argument is an astonishing slided side view into the relationships inside and outside the brain. A good 70s shirt would read "Its a brain thing" - Rosenberg hints mind is like a fake dos level os, way way old. It can't be updated. Why are we still stuck here? The neuroscientists he's lined up are the magellanic cloud breaking through to the other side. Numerous parallels support Rosenberg, especially Merlin Donald in Origins of the Modern Mind, who boldly claimed we were stuck under the glass ceiling of mythology while undergoing wrenching demythologization. It's neuroscience proving Donald right via Rosenberg. As a student whose read Donald and John Bonner, EO Wilson, Jaak Pankseep, Rosenberg gets us to the real decision making process in the brain and then shows how we spoil it in return by adding all this intention, at the wrong stages and scales: storytelling. How we memorize it now we spoil it. It's spoiled goods as we assess our surroundings BY the way we store it. And how we think we access those memories and use them, that process was laid down from age 1-x and then kicked in at x age. There's a behaviorist uploading of the perception of stimulus OS that's mostly wordless, then language kicks in dragging cause and effect into our heads. Gotta chuck this last part and make a new one.
October 5, 2019
The thesis of this book can be divided into 2 ideas:
1: history is not scientific (it doesn't have datapoints and it doesn't lend to predictability)
2: information (in this case historical) presented in narrative format cannot resemble or approach 'truthfullness' due to the inherent limits of the narrative structure
The idea that (1) history is not scientific is obvious and the author even admits it in multiple places throughout this book. Think of the book's title like clickbait for Youtube - the author is trying to excite you into picking up this work. On further scrutiny, the author takes history to task for not being essentially reductive (for not being reducible to independent datapoints) and for not allowing regular, accurate prediction based on past information (hypothesis testing). Though the limits of history as a tool for the predicting the future is an interesting topic, very little is done to assert the author's take on this point beyond loose association. For reducability - I'm sorry that the life and the universe don't conform to the western scientific interpretation as this might make it more palatable to the author.
The idea that (2) narrative cannot be used as a medium for exploring or deriving meaning from other information (such as the past) is clearly undermined by the fact that the author's argument takes place in a narrative format. If his claim were true, we would have no reason to believe or follow the book's reasoning.
It is easy to ignore the other sweeping arguments that the author makes and for which no evidence is offered (such that 'narrative history causes more harm than good') due to the weakness of his 2 main contentions, but there are plenty of these too.
You can read other reviews below for similar exploration/elaboration on the shortcomings of this book.
1: history is not scientific (it doesn't have datapoints and it doesn't lend to predictability)
2: information (in this case historical) presented in narrative format cannot resemble or approach 'truthfullness' due to the inherent limits of the narrative structure
The idea that (1) history is not scientific is obvious and the author even admits it in multiple places throughout this book. Think of the book's title like clickbait for Youtube - the author is trying to excite you into picking up this work. On further scrutiny, the author takes history to task for not being essentially reductive (for not being reducible to independent datapoints) and for not allowing regular, accurate prediction based on past information (hypothesis testing). Though the limits of history as a tool for the predicting the future is an interesting topic, very little is done to assert the author's take on this point beyond loose association. For reducability - I'm sorry that the life and the universe don't conform to the western scientific interpretation as this might make it more palatable to the author.
The idea that (2) narrative cannot be used as a medium for exploring or deriving meaning from other information (such as the past) is clearly undermined by the fact that the author's argument takes place in a narrative format. If his claim were true, we would have no reason to believe or follow the book's reasoning.
It is easy to ignore the other sweeping arguments that the author makes and for which no evidence is offered (such that 'narrative history causes more harm than good') due to the weakness of his 2 main contentions, but there are plenty of these too.
You can read other reviews below for similar exploration/elaboration on the shortcomings of this book.
November 6, 2019
This book was funny, clever, and also dense. I read about three books while reading this one. Eventually I finished it so I could figure out whether narrative truly is dead -- a suspicion I have nurtured for some time. So I blitzkrieged through the last 1⅓ which was difficult considering the long Kissinger passages that were, however maddening, useful for building up Rosenberg's argument.
This book was a formidable task, philosophically. The problem seems simple; Rosenberg basically revealed his 'solution' on a Sean Carroll Mindscape podcast, episode. So I didn't think a book of this detail and range, from deconstruction of narrative history writing to our relation to sea slugs to a deleted phrase from one of Darwin's drafts of the Origin....
However, Rosenberg carried out the task of building the argument, integrating obscure historical excerpts, tracts of straight-up neuroscience, the broader context of philosophy of science, and a crazy breakdown of Guns Germs and Steel, which I recommend reading before this. (I can't even remember reading it but what I remembered helped).
There was no pop-psych fluff or throwing out babies with bathwater. Rosenberg reserved the right of creative writers to engage with history. I agree with moral portion of his conclusion, which is that theory-of-mind as a basis for judgment undermines our understanding of the human condition.
Rosenberg's careful delineations seem idiosyncratic at times, but he has a lot of ground to cover. This type of conversation too easily ends with people throwing up their hands and saying oh, so everything is relative and nothing means anything. Rosenberg provides ground where we can at least discuss a world of meaning without the type of meaning predicated on...theory of mind, or what has been the basis of meaning for most of us, thus far.
This book was a formidable task, philosophically. The problem seems simple; Rosenberg basically revealed his 'solution' on a Sean Carroll Mindscape podcast, episode. So I didn't think a book of this detail and range, from deconstruction of narrative history writing to our relation to sea slugs to a deleted phrase from one of Darwin's drafts of the Origin....
However, Rosenberg carried out the task of building the argument, integrating obscure historical excerpts, tracts of straight-up neuroscience, the broader context of philosophy of science, and a crazy breakdown of Guns Germs and Steel, which I recommend reading before this. (I can't even remember reading it but what I remembered helped).
There was no pop-psych fluff or throwing out babies with bathwater. Rosenberg reserved the right of creative writers to engage with history. I agree with moral portion of his conclusion, which is that theory-of-mind as a basis for judgment undermines our understanding of the human condition.
Rosenberg's careful delineations seem idiosyncratic at times, but he has a lot of ground to cover. This type of conversation too easily ends with people throwing up their hands and saying oh, so everything is relative and nothing means anything. Rosenberg provides ground where we can at least discuss a world of meaning without the type of meaning predicated on...theory of mind, or what has been the basis of meaning for most of us, thus far.
January 27, 2019
I'm really glad I read Jared Diamond's book (Guns, Germs and Steel) before reading this one, and that's the order I would recommend them by. I do agree with other reviewers that the thesis and its supporting evidence become clear quite early on, and the book structure seems to drag towards the middle. A very enjoyable read nonetheless.
July 20, 2020
I picked this up after hearing Rosenberg on the Mindscape podcast, fascinated by the subject and wanting to learn more. The book gets a little long-winded, making many of the same observations about the way history unspools through stories over and over again. It makes sense to want to drive the points home, and there are still some interesting angles in the last half (I particularly enjoyed the chapter on Kissinger) but it felt like it could be a little leaner, though maybe I ruined it for myself listening to the (very compelling, much shorter) podcast episode first.
June 20, 2020
A provocative but challenging book, How History Get Things Wrong argues that our addiction to storytelling is misleading us when it comes to understanding history. See my full review at https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2019...
November 13, 2018
Dogs dogs dog dog dogs.
January 1, 2021
A very important subject, on the treatment of which this blabbering, error-ridden book spectacularly fails to deliver.
December 4, 2020
"To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail", sums up this book's approach
April 28, 2020
(...) when I learned Rosenberg had written a book about our addiction to stories, I couldn’t resist and bought it. This book is a very different read than Darwinian Reductionism: a whole lot more accessible, written for a somewhat larger audience – although this is still no pop science book. While not without problems, it is very much worth your time if you have a serious, academic interest in human behavior, theory of mind, and narrative – Rosenberg’s scope is both broad and deep.
How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories biggest shortcoming is its title. It’s great from a marketing point of view, but it is a bit misleading. Yes, history features, as do stories, but in the end, they are a sideshow. Rosenberg uses the fallacies of narrative history to frame his central argument, which is a refutation of the most commonly held (folk) ‘theory of mind‘. He does so mainly with recent findings from neuroscience.
(...)
One more remark before the jump, maybe a crucial one, I don’t know. Neural circuits in the brain do not have content or represent something indeed, but it is obvious that their material output (our speech, our writing, to a certain extent maybe our conscious thoughts as well, …) does. The brain lacks content, sure, but it forms content. I would think that you cannot treat the brain as a closed system, and that we need to take its extensions so to say into account as well.
I’m not sure what this means for Rosenberg’s overall theory. Maybe it is not much more than a matter of sharper definitions. Rosenberg talks about cell circuitry that does not ‘represent’ or ‘interpret’ etc. – but again, what about their output? Is that part of the brain as well? Or part of its representation/interpretation/aboutness?
Or maybe his main beef shouldn’t be with narrative history and theory of mind, but narrative history and the folk theory of mind that presupposes rational, non-causally determined agency of human actors. The neuroscience and other points raised could easily support that.
(...)
Full review on Weighing A Pig
How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories biggest shortcoming is its title. It’s great from a marketing point of view, but it is a bit misleading. Yes, history features, as do stories, but in the end, they are a sideshow. Rosenberg uses the fallacies of narrative history to frame his central argument, which is a refutation of the most commonly held (folk) ‘theory of mind‘. He does so mainly with recent findings from neuroscience.
(...)
One more remark before the jump, maybe a crucial one, I don’t know. Neural circuits in the brain do not have content or represent something indeed, but it is obvious that their material output (our speech, our writing, to a certain extent maybe our conscious thoughts as well, …) does. The brain lacks content, sure, but it forms content. I would think that you cannot treat the brain as a closed system, and that we need to take its extensions so to say into account as well.
I’m not sure what this means for Rosenberg’s overall theory. Maybe it is not much more than a matter of sharper definitions. Rosenberg talks about cell circuitry that does not ‘represent’ or ‘interpret’ etc. – but again, what about their output? Is that part of the brain as well? Or part of its representation/interpretation/aboutness?
Or maybe his main beef shouldn’t be with narrative history and theory of mind, but narrative history and the folk theory of mind that presupposes rational, non-causally determined agency of human actors. The neuroscience and other points raised could easily support that.
(...)
Full review on Weighing A Pig
November 5, 2023
Drawing on eliminativism about folk psychology (that is, loosely speaking, the theory that each of us understands others by guessing what they might believe and desire by extrapolating from our own ability to "look into" our own minds about what we believe and desire), Rosenberg claims that all history writing that tries to explain by hypothesising about actors' beliefs and desires is false. What should replace this kind of historical method? Rosenberg claims that Darwinian/evolutionary forms of explanation (say, Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel") are the way ahead and, in fact, academic historiography has already moved in that direction. "Belief-desire" narrative writing is now limited to literature, pop history writing and the creative arts, he claims; and in these fields it is harmless as long as their only purpose is to entertain. But banished it must be from all scholarly pursuits, he is confident.
May 29, 2023
Has an interesting yet very radical claim. As someone who values the power of fiction and storytelling, it was hard to read a book that basically argued how our innate drive to read history as a narrative has hindered our ability to learn from history.
The book suffers a bit from how it switched back and forth on its discussions on neuroscience and it’s connection to the faults in studying history. There wasn’t much smooth transition or synthesis of the two subjects. In fact, some chapters were just quick crash courses of recent neuroscience findings which sometimes left you wondering of the overall connections of these neuroscience studies and Rosenberg’s argument about the dangers of historiography.
The book reaches its peak in the last few chapters when it applies theory of mind research when interpreting historical interpretations of important historical events like the Congress of Vienna ( very meta and interesting for a psychology- history nerd like myself).
It’s crazy that this guy is a professor at Duke and I can just one day show up to his office hours and voice my opinions— I’ll think about it….
The book suffers a bit from how it switched back and forth on its discussions on neuroscience and it’s connection to the faults in studying history. There wasn’t much smooth transition or synthesis of the two subjects. In fact, some chapters were just quick crash courses of recent neuroscience findings which sometimes left you wondering of the overall connections of these neuroscience studies and Rosenberg’s argument about the dangers of historiography.
The book reaches its peak in the last few chapters when it applies theory of mind research when interpreting historical interpretations of important historical events like the Congress of Vienna ( very meta and interesting for a psychology- history nerd like myself).
It’s crazy that this guy is a professor at Duke and I can just one day show up to his office hours and voice my opinions— I’ll think about it….
January 14, 2021
It's a research paper on Narrative History and the Neuroscience behind it. Because of the argument that narrative is what's wrong with our recollection of all history - namely that the version of history that the author expounds upon largely depends on where they come from, what they seek to achieve, and their values - any narrative that would have made this digestible and interesting to read is notably avoided. As a result, it's one of the dullest books I've ever read. So much so, in fact, that I have PTSD now for all other research-forward books and would prefer to throw them across the room rather than listen to an author expostulate for an additional 9 chapters on what the first 4 chapters already explained.
November 20, 2018
“Stories are for children and for the child in us all. Nothing will ever stop us from loving them, at least not until natural selection radically changes our neurology. Narrative historians, like other storytellers, will never want for an audience. But we will all benefit by recognizing what narrative history at its best and most harmless actually gives us—not knowledge or wisdom, but entertainment, escape, abiding pleasure. That should be enough.”
December 20, 2024
Summary
Rosenberg sets out to 'prove' through Neuroscience that the way we understand our past, present, and future might not be based on a misunderstanding. In what is sure to ruffle the feathers of academics of every stripe, Rosenberg uses various studies as a lever to overturn several common theories of mind. For the uninitiated, a theory of mind is an explanatory framework whose purpose is to explain the mind to itself. Most common theories of mind rely on the iconic duo of desire and action. Charles is crying because he can't get an ice cream cone. In the previous sentence, we are met with Charles' desire and the action that results from the desire, a cause and an effect. Rosenberg then uses this as a jumping-off point to argue that this core assumption that almost all theories of mind make is flawed.
This is a tall order because how else can we understand Charles' crying if not by its dependent relation with the ice cream cone, the object of his desire? To understand Rosenberg's argument, the first step is to realize that an effect can have multiple seemingly plausible explanations. For example, you could go the crank psychologist route: Charles is crying because he thinks he wants the ice cream cone, but in reality, the ice cream cone is a substitute for his mother's affection. Another possible explanation: a KGB spy injected Charles with a serum that causes him to cry when he sees ice cream. The important thing to remember is that causes and effects are linked by a story we construct, and the story may or may not be true.
I think one of the best ways to conceptualize the possibility that Rosenberg is pushing on his readers is to imagine a tortoise wandering around an island doing tortoise things, but all the while the tortoise is followed closely by a hummingbird. This hummingbird narrates all the tortoise's actions so the observer can understand the causes. The longer the hummingbird follows the tortoise, the better it becomes at anticipating the behavior patterns of the tortoise, so much so that the narration mostly coincides with the actions taken by the tortoise. Rosenberg would argue this scenario is analogous to the condition we find ourselves in. Our bodies are finely tuned machines responding to various stimuli in the external environment. At the same time, we have this rich conscious experience that runs a constant commentary on what it thinks our body is up to. The key insight here is to realize that this implies that conscious experience is retroactive—that is, our experience is a post-hoc explanation of an event that has already happened, and just like with the hummingbird, our explanations may or may not coincide with the 'reality' of the actions that our body is taking. This is easy enough to intuit when it comes to autonomic processes, like when your stomach growls, you may experience it as your body being hungry but would also be willing to adopt a different explanation if one were offered by your doctor. This is a harder pill to swallow when it comes to conscious centric experiences like anger, rationality, or awe. At this point, the inner monologue is so compelling that it becomes almost impossible not to believe the "reasons" our mind generates for feeling one way or another. Rosenberg would argue that in reality the line between autonomic and voluntary processes don't exist. The difference is just in how convincing our inner voice is.
If this is true, then the title starts to make much more sense. At the same time, it reveals how the title is, in many ways, too narrow. If we are inscrutable to ourselves how much more so must others be? This would make history, social sciences, psychology, and many more pursuits to understand human actions no more than a fool's errand.
Thoughts
A provocative title for a provocative book, it is somewhat reminiscent of the ever present "You're doing 'X' wrong" articles where 'X' is something like using a can opener. Overall, the arguments in the book are compelling. I am not qualified to comment on the neuroscientific research or conclusions that are in the book, but then again, one could argue that Rosenberg isn't either. One must wonder, why if the conclusions from neuroscience are as clear as Rosenberg claims them to be, the opinions of neuroscientists haven't more closely clustered around Rosenberg's ideas. Rosenberg would argue this reflects how deeply rooted our intuitions about theory of mind are. On the other hand, I would argue that it's also plausible his conclusions aren't the only valid interpretations of the data.
While this is true, advances in language models seem to be aligning with some of Rosenberg's intuitions. Most interestingly, it has been demonstrated that when you ask an LLM to explain how it reached its conclusions, you can't just accept its explanation. The reason is that the explanation it generates may be a hallucination. The parallels between the architecture of LLM's and the way human's think points in the same direction as Rosenberg's retroactive explanation. Rosenberg compares himself to fringe thinkers like Darwin and Copernicus, arguing that his ideas will eventually gain acceptance as evidence accumulates. I also agree that the direction of research tends to be moving towards his position, but I also think this book lacks the clarity to be the "Origin of Species" of a new movement. Whether or not Rosenberg's opinions become mainstream is something only time will tell, and hopefully they don't become another thing that history gets wrong.
Rosenberg sets out to 'prove' through Neuroscience that the way we understand our past, present, and future might not be based on a misunderstanding. In what is sure to ruffle the feathers of academics of every stripe, Rosenberg uses various studies as a lever to overturn several common theories of mind. For the uninitiated, a theory of mind is an explanatory framework whose purpose is to explain the mind to itself. Most common theories of mind rely on the iconic duo of desire and action. Charles is crying because he can't get an ice cream cone. In the previous sentence, we are met with Charles' desire and the action that results from the desire, a cause and an effect. Rosenberg then uses this as a jumping-off point to argue that this core assumption that almost all theories of mind make is flawed.
This is a tall order because how else can we understand Charles' crying if not by its dependent relation with the ice cream cone, the object of his desire? To understand Rosenberg's argument, the first step is to realize that an effect can have multiple seemingly plausible explanations. For example, you could go the crank psychologist route: Charles is crying because he thinks he wants the ice cream cone, but in reality, the ice cream cone is a substitute for his mother's affection. Another possible explanation: a KGB spy injected Charles with a serum that causes him to cry when he sees ice cream. The important thing to remember is that causes and effects are linked by a story we construct, and the story may or may not be true.
I think one of the best ways to conceptualize the possibility that Rosenberg is pushing on his readers is to imagine a tortoise wandering around an island doing tortoise things, but all the while the tortoise is followed closely by a hummingbird. This hummingbird narrates all the tortoise's actions so the observer can understand the causes. The longer the hummingbird follows the tortoise, the better it becomes at anticipating the behavior patterns of the tortoise, so much so that the narration mostly coincides with the actions taken by the tortoise. Rosenberg would argue this scenario is analogous to the condition we find ourselves in. Our bodies are finely tuned machines responding to various stimuli in the external environment. At the same time, we have this rich conscious experience that runs a constant commentary on what it thinks our body is up to. The key insight here is to realize that this implies that conscious experience is retroactive—that is, our experience is a post-hoc explanation of an event that has already happened, and just like with the hummingbird, our explanations may or may not coincide with the 'reality' of the actions that our body is taking. This is easy enough to intuit when it comes to autonomic processes, like when your stomach growls, you may experience it as your body being hungry but would also be willing to adopt a different explanation if one were offered by your doctor. This is a harder pill to swallow when it comes to conscious centric experiences like anger, rationality, or awe. At this point, the inner monologue is so compelling that it becomes almost impossible not to believe the "reasons" our mind generates for feeling one way or another. Rosenberg would argue that in reality the line between autonomic and voluntary processes don't exist. The difference is just in how convincing our inner voice is.
If this is true, then the title starts to make much more sense. At the same time, it reveals how the title is, in many ways, too narrow. If we are inscrutable to ourselves how much more so must others be? This would make history, social sciences, psychology, and many more pursuits to understand human actions no more than a fool's errand.
Thoughts
A provocative title for a provocative book, it is somewhat reminiscent of the ever present "You're doing 'X' wrong" articles where 'X' is something like using a can opener. Overall, the arguments in the book are compelling. I am not qualified to comment on the neuroscientific research or conclusions that are in the book, but then again, one could argue that Rosenberg isn't either. One must wonder, why if the conclusions from neuroscience are as clear as Rosenberg claims them to be, the opinions of neuroscientists haven't more closely clustered around Rosenberg's ideas. Rosenberg would argue this reflects how deeply rooted our intuitions about theory of mind are. On the other hand, I would argue that it's also plausible his conclusions aren't the only valid interpretations of the data.
While this is true, advances in language models seem to be aligning with some of Rosenberg's intuitions. Most interestingly, it has been demonstrated that when you ask an LLM to explain how it reached its conclusions, you can't just accept its explanation. The reason is that the explanation it generates may be a hallucination. The parallels between the architecture of LLM's and the way human's think points in the same direction as Rosenberg's retroactive explanation. Rosenberg compares himself to fringe thinkers like Darwin and Copernicus, arguing that his ideas will eventually gain acceptance as evidence accumulates. I also agree that the direction of research tends to be moving towards his position, but I also think this book lacks the clarity to be the "Origin of Species" of a new movement. Whether or not Rosenberg's opinions become mainstream is something only time will tell, and hopefully they don't become another thing that history gets wrong.
October 14, 2019
Was expecting something different. Was expecting juicy cases on true historical cases, but got superficial deepdive on how human brain works
February 19, 2020
One of the books I've learned the most from ever.
December 7, 2018
After reading How History Gets Things Wrong, I regretted not taking a philosophy course as an undergraduate - especially since it would have been at MIT where philosophy, cognitive science and linguistics have a very close relationships. Alex Rosenberg is deliberately provocative suggesting that the only value of conventional narrative history and biography is as good stories, because narrative history assumes a belief/desire model of the human mind that is inconsistent with the findings of modern neuroscience. Time and again, we see that people who claim to have learned from history make bad decisions (this is hard to disagree with), and Rosenberg's argument is that our imposition of a faulty model of the human mind in creating narrative is to blame.
It's great stuff, but be prepared for some difficult reading. While Rosenberg assumes only basic scientific literacy (no specialized knowledge required), some of the neuroscience is pretty tough to follow. But you don't have to understand everything to make this an enjoyable read. Rosenberg concludes that we should be thinking about different ways of looking at history, and cites one of my favorite history books - Guns, Germs and Steel - as an example of how to look at history as dominated by cultural evolution rather than emerging from the beliefs and desires of individuals.
Whether or not you wind up agreeing, there's a lot to chew on after reading this book. I know that I will continue to read narrative history, but I will no longer look at it quite the same way.
It's great stuff, but be prepared for some difficult reading. While Rosenberg assumes only basic scientific literacy (no specialized knowledge required), some of the neuroscience is pretty tough to follow. But you don't have to understand everything to make this an enjoyable read. Rosenberg concludes that we should be thinking about different ways of looking at history, and cites one of my favorite history books - Guns, Germs and Steel - as an example of how to look at history as dominated by cultural evolution rather than emerging from the beliefs and desires of individuals.
Whether or not you wind up agreeing, there's a lot to chew on after reading this book. I know that I will continue to read narrative history, but I will no longer look at it quite the same way.
December 25, 2018
A provocative book that is surely to be referenced more and more as time passes. Some readers may accuse it of being a work of scientism, a charge likely embraced by Rosenberg with open arms. His argument in brief: Neuroscience shows that our beliefs and desires are not mapped in brains in any way that is recognizable by simplistic theories of mind (i.e. folk psychology). So, attempts to describe the intentions of other minds cannot possibly be right which means narrative approaches to history are not just wrong, they are actively misleading. Understanding history requires many more Jared Diamonds and many fewer, in fact zero, Henry Kissingers. Rosenberg's descriptions of the underlying neuroscience can be hard sledding at times, but the overall structure of his argument is organized and compelling. Thought-provoking stuff that may be wished away by fans of popular nonfiction texts but that cannot be ignored if they value accurate historical knowledge.
February 2, 2019
It is challenging to think about a macro phenomenon like history through the lens of neuroscience. I rather doubt that the author gets it right, but it is an excellent stab in the right direction. Many people will reject what the author has to say about what neuroscience tells us. It's against our "common sense", but over time we will move to that way of thinking. When we do, some formula close to what the author has to say is how we interpret history.
By chance, I read this book after reading Thucydides. I didn't find Thucydides credible. His narratives were just too much for my skepticism. If you don't quite get Rosenburg's point, try reading a few chapters of Thucydides and it should clear up that problem for you.
By chance, I read this book after reading Thucydides. I didn't find Thucydides credible. His narratives were just too much for my skepticism. If you don't quite get Rosenburg's point, try reading a few chapters of Thucydides and it should clear up that problem for you.
January 23, 2020
I grabbed this from the table at Spoonbill & Sugartown because it seemed to directly address the topic cluster with which I've been most obsessed in recent years - whether there can be any firm connection made between narrative and knowledge whatsoever, and if so, how; I found this book somewhat informative and good as a guide to further reading in the area, and as an introduction to some of the modern neuroscience I didn't know about, but also pretty lamely written: tendentious, repetitive, lacking in vivid explanatory metaphors, lacking in good examples, and way too emphatic on the author's key points, not even to mention the lousy sentence construction and numerous typos. It could have been a great essay if cut down to one fourth of its length. A full book it's not.
August 30, 2024
Al iniciar Rosenberg plantea que no va a definir History y ese es el procedimiento de todo el libro, toma términos y nunca lso define, salvo cuando le conviene a su argumentación, como con la indefinición de la Theory of Mind, que la utiliza indiferentemente como el fenómeno que una hipótesis exlica y como la hipótesis misma. Su premisa central es que hay que dejar de explicar a través de narrativas ya que estas apelan a conmover —según su idea de Theory of Mind— y como si el libro no tuviera una narrativa y no se sirviera de ellas para construir su discurso. Rosenberg no solo no define los concetos que utiliza sino que algunos de ellos los da por sentados e inmutables, como si los procesos históricos no los cambiaran.
June 9, 2019
Interesting ideas but perhaps not the best choice as an audio book. The narrator is quite good but the material is a bit dense for the medium. I wanted to go back and re-read sections and that is a pain to do with an audio book.
I suspect that I will end up re-reading this book in a more visual mode sometime.
I suspect that I will end up re-reading this book in a more visual mode sometime.
July 15, 2020
Why we learn the wrong things from narrative history, and how our love for stories is hard-wired.
To understand something, you need to know its history. Right? Wrong, says Alex Rosenberg in How History Gets Things Wrong. Feeling especially well-informed after reading a book of popular history on the best-seller list? Don't. Narrative history is always, always wrong.
To understand something, you need to know its history. Right? Wrong, says Alex Rosenberg in How History Gets Things Wrong. Feeling especially well-informed after reading a book of popular history on the best-seller list? Don't. Narrative history is always, always wrong.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 37 reviews