For some time I've been thinking about just how much of our understanding of the world is tied up in stories and narratives.

Let's take gravity. Even children playing with balls have a good idea of where a ball is going to land after they throw it. They don't know anything about spacetime curvature or Newton's laws. Instead, they amass a lot of data about the behavior of previously-thrown balls and from this they can predict where a newly-thrown ball will land. With experience, this does not even require conscious thought--a skilled ball-player is already moving into position by the time he's consciously aware of what's happening.

You can do the same thing with computers. Once you have enough raw data, you can tabulate it and use various methods to make predictions. These can range from simple interpolation to more complicated statistical modeling. The point is that you don't need any deeper understanding of the underlying phenomena to make it work. You can get good results as long as the phenomena are nice enough and the initial conditions aren't far removed from the data you used to construct the model. Going back to balls, you'll do fine predicting how a ball thrown by a human will behave, but the methods will probably fail if you shot a ball out of a cannon.

So far, so good. You can treat actual phenomena as a black box and make predictions based only on initial conditions, and this works for everyday life. Yet, we feel a drive to explain things. We like to come up with stories. Most of these are silly, but largely harmless. Sometimes, though, we happen upon a useful story or analogy. These stories transcend the role of explanations and enable us to make predictions outside of our accumulated data. Aristotle's gravity didn't have a detrimental effect on the engineering of the day due to the aforementioned use of experience, but Newton's gravity let us push things so much further.

Modern physics is full of these stories which are wrong, but make for good enough analogies to be useful. Take continuum mechanics. We know matter is made of atoms and molecules, but we sometimes assume it's continuous. Then we take this continuous matter and assume it's made up of tiny boxes (finite elements), each subjected to a constant force. We look at how the force acts on these tiny boxes and add up all the contributions to get an idea of what happens to a large object. Take limits, neglect higher-order terms, and you've got yourself a nice set of equations. In this case, a good story can be more useful than the truth.

The hard part is coming up with a good narrative framework. Working out the details is a lot easier once you have a mental picture of where you are and where you're going. It's easy to come up with a story that doesn't add anything--some ad-hoc tale to satisfy your desire for an explanation and let you go on doing what you were doing with your black-box model.

Sorry if this is a bit disjointed. I'm still trying to straighten it out in my own mind.