The previous post argued that science participates in the evolution of possibility: it reconfigures what can be thought, instantiated, and explained. This post examines the unacknowledged consequence of that work: the production of orientation, and the formation of myths.
Science and myth are often contrasted
Science is typically described as the enemy of myth.
Myths are said to be false, explanatory fictions. Science is said to correct them with evidence and logic.
But this opposition rests on a representational picture: that science mirrors reality while myth misrepresents it.
Once representation is no longer doing the work, this opposition dissolves.
What science stabilises
Science stabilises configurations of possibility. In doing so, it produces patterns of orientation:
what can be distinguished,
what counts as significant,
what sequences, relations, and correlations are intelligible,
and what kinds of intervention are possible.
These patterns function like myths. They provide a framework in which action, thought, and expectation can operate reliably. But unlike traditional myth, they are disciplined, coordinated, and empirically constrained.
Myth, in this sense, is not false story; it is stabilised orientation within possibility.
Examples in practice
Consider fundamental scientific concepts:
Objectivity, information, force, evolution.
Each is not merely a description of reality. Each stabilises a certain way of interacting with the world:
deciding what counts as evidence,
what experiments are legitimate,
which distinctions matter,
and which manipulations are intelligible.
They are operational myths: frameworks that hold possibility steady enough for coordinated action and expectation.
Orientation without belief
This has profound implications.
Orientation is not belief. One may operate effectively within a scientific system without committing to metaphysical realism, without “believing” in laws as things in themselves.
What matters is the stability of the system, and one’s ability to navigate it reliably.
Science produces orientation in the same sense that myth does, but in a disciplined, replicable, and constrained manner.
Why myths matter
Myths, understood relationally, are not errors to be eliminated. They are functional:
they guide attention,
they shape action,
they stabilise coordination,
and they make experience intelligible.
Science, when successful, produces myths that are generative: they allow phenomena, experiments, and new conceptual structures to emerge that would otherwise be impossible.
Science as myth-producer
Viewed this way, science and myth are continuous:
science produces myths of orientation,
myths stabilise possibility,
possibility enables phenomena,
and phenomena sustain further science.
The difference between scientific and pre-scientific myth is not truthfulness, but discipline, repeatability, and scope of coordination.
Science is the most sophisticated myth-making practice humanity has devised, not because it is superior in truth, but because it reliably stabilises structured possibility across time and observers.
Toward the series conclusion
This series has moved from questions about representation to the recognition that:
objects are perspectival actualisations,
experiments are ontological cuts,
systems cannot close,
science changes what can be thought,
possibility evolves,
and science produces orientation through operational myths.
The final post will synthesise these threads, making explicit what it means to understand science after representation, without collapsing into prescriptive or metaphysical claims.
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