We’ve all felt it: a passage in fiction, a moment on stage, a scene in a movie that generates a deeply felt truth. It’s not literally true - but something in it feels powerfully true: emotionally, morally, even rationally. Why do stories have the power to resonate a form of intuitive truth that can feel so real and profound?

Christopher Booker observed that stories - ancient and modern, sacred and secular - generalize to just seven recurring plot-lines. Perhaps these are not just patterns in storytelling, but reflections of how we are wired to understand meaning itself: unconscious frameworks that shape what we recognize as emotionally and morally true.

Immanuel Kant proposed that we never experience reality “as it is,” but only as it appears through the lens of our mind’s innate structures. Perhaps narrative structure works the same way. Booker’s seven plots may be more than storytelling patterns - they may be the deep grammar through which our minds organize meaning and recognize truth, even in fiction.

Frank Jamieson serves as the speaker chair and steering committee member of Marin Philosophy Society. He is also a board member of Marin Commonwealth Club World Affairs. He also recently founded Marin Non-Partisanship Forum to explore urgent political issues in an objective fact-based non-partisan manner.