Fabulator · Effective Fabulations: a Philosophical Anthropology

“Everything is a story”. A fabula. This has become a commonplace, but its foundations remain largely unknown. Everywhere, all the time, when we tell (ourselves) stories, when we dream, think, experience the world, we are fabulating, to varying degrees and according to distinct modalities that need to be examined. Why is this? How does it happen and with what consequences? What becomes of truth in a fabulatory epistemological regime? What can we know about reality if we keep inventing it? Are all fabulations equal? And if we are to reject such relativism, how, then, can we discriminate between those worthy of our credence and those not? These issues are highly topical in our challenging age of post-truth and fake news, with countless ramifications such as conspiracy theories, cognitive biases, echo chambers and virtual reality… The FABULATOR project, based on the production of scientific articles and podcasts, will address the ins and outs of these varied phenomena by exposing their logic and coherence on the basis of what, in human nature, makes them possible, thus removing an epistemological hurdle. Its main aim is to set up an archaeology of the epistemological regime that is dominant today, by sketching out the outlines of a philosophical anthropology. The central hypothesis is that fabulation is an essential activity of the mind and, therefore, the driving force for human behaviour.Beyond the duration of the action, its ambition is to lay the foundations for (I) a new kind of essay on man, based on this fundamental fabulatory activity, but for which a theoretical framework is lacking, and (II) for the elaboration of a new research field: fabulation studies. The research problem this project addresses is the absence of a comprehensive theoretical framework for fabulation as a core cognitive and cultural mechanism, aiming to establish its epistemological foundations and assess its impact on human belief, knowledge, and behavior.