or, How Thinking About That Which Is Non-Literal Is Not a Lie But Instead Integral to Knowing Reality
“People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy, and I can’t do that as Bruce Wayne. As a man I’m flesh and blood. I can be ignored. I can be destroyed. But as a symbol? As a symbol I can be incorruptible; I can be everlasting.”
—Batman Begins
Fiction and representational art are not literal, and so many famous people have said half-jokingly that fiction and representational art are “lies.” In his book SeinLanguage, Jerry Seinfeld quipped that he appreciates how bookstores are divided by section “into fiction and nonfiction. In other words, these people are lying, and these people are telling the truth. That’s the way the world should be” ([New York: Bantam, 1993], 1). Likewise, in an interview for the May 1923 issue of The Arts, Pablo Picasso said, “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand...” Similarly, in Minima Moralia, Frankfurt school neo-Marxist Theodor Adorno pronounced, “Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.”
- Our ancestors came to experience and interpret sensory stimuli in a manner they knew to be nonliteral. That is how symbolism arose.
- It is through this cognitive process that we have gained a greater understanding of what happens literally.
Not Literal and Not Lying
A lie is told under the following circumstances. Person 1 presents to Person 2 some claim that is not true literally but which Person 1 intends for Person 2 to interpret as the direct literal truth. Fiction honestly presented as fiction — and this includes performances by stage magicians — does not consist of lies, as the art is not presented as the literal truth. Yet I will argue in this essay that though artworks are not the literal truth, an art piece resonates with you when you interpret it as dramatizing some principle that you interpret as being true literally.
There is an entire profession or discipline of artists who are tasked with depicting reality for the purpose of providing scientific understanding. A wildlife painter is supposed to paint animals and their environments accurately. Our knowledge of extinct prehistoric animals is far from perfect and complete. But the job of “paleo-artists” is to portray prehistoric animals in a manner that is up-to-date and consistent with what is known at the time about these beasts. A well-shaded painting of a Tyrannosaurus with three fingers on each hand might be quality art, but it would not be quality paleo-art; the T. rex having three fingers on each hand instead of two is a glaring inaccuracy to scientists.
Let’s say that for a book that is to be educational for children, an artist provides a detailed and accurate painting of a male lion.
Symbolism occurs when X is not Y literally but X still represents Y in your mind. As noted in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, symbols are inherent to the use of concepts. A concept is an abstracted symbol representing all particular instances of an entity or event, all grouped together by their shared traits relevant to that which defines the concept. The concept “dog” encompasses all dogs that have ever lived and will ever live, both ones you have observed and ones you haven’t, and includes all breeds. The concept “dog” is the symbol for all dogs that exist literally. And the word “dog” symbolizes, in your mind, the concept of “dog.”
And it’s not the case that these words are only for communicating oneself with others. Rather, you gain clarity from introspecting to yourself with these words. Languages are sometimes presumed falsely to be no more than tools of communication. But first they are tools of thought, of thinking to oneself. You use words to communicate with others but, even more importantly, you use them to communicate with yourself. Symbols are inherent in this. Symbols are integral to rational thought itself.
You may remember René Magritte’s silly painting of a pipe that has the caption “This is not a pipe.” By that, the painter meant it is not a pipe literally; it is a symbolic representation of a pipe.
There is great variation in the degree of precision and accuracy that a symbol can take in its depiction of entities that it represents. The word snake does not come very close to providing a visually accurate representation of a snake, but a wildlife photograph of one usually does. Both of those are symbols. Earlier I mentioned a drawing of a T. rex that inaccurately places three fingers on each hand. That is a symbol of a T. rex, but that symbol is less preferred by scientists than a drawing that more accurately places two fingers on each hand. That some symbols are less accurate than others is not a fault of symbolism per se. In the marketplace of ideas and communication, the symbols that are inadequate in how closely they represent the truth can be outcompeted and supplanted by ones that do it better.
When our ancestors discerned that animals are capable of camouflage, that was a big deal in the history of epistemology. It meant our ancestors came to an important realization. That was that someone can interpret and experience a sensory stimulus in a manner other than what is happening literally. In the case of the chameleon in front of you escaping notice, what is happening literally is that the chameleon is in front of you. But, in your interpretation, it as though the chameleon were absent. It mattered a lot for our ancestors to come to understand that someone can interpret and experience a sensory stimulus in a manner other than what is happening literally. That is because that is what a symbol is. It is what happens when you are engrossed in an exciting work of fiction. Immersed in an adventure novel, you react emotionally as though you were there. But what happened literally was that you spent hours staring at a series of standardized markings on sheets of paper.
If a camouflaged animal successfully escapes your notice, then you never learn that this particular interpretation of the event was different from what happened literally. By contrast, when you read a novel that you love, you know consciously that the events described did not happen literally. But, in both instances, the interpretation and the experience of the sensory stimulus were something other than what happened literally. And insofar as a clever handling of a truth that is far from obvious might be tricksterism, this understanding about camouflage might be considered an instance where tricksterism is not a form of scientific fraud but instead a clever advance in disciplines related to science.
When I first wrote the above, I thought I might have been the first to make that connection. However, in a 1998 book on popular science, biological anthropologist and neuroscientist Terrence W. Deacon also argues as much.
Accurate chemical formulae discovered by scientists are all symbols. But they convey what happens literally. The formula showing how the chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen creates water is a symbol. But that is also what happens literally.
By definition, symbols are nonliteral. But, when used properly, they help us understand what happens literally. That is the true funny irony in this: the fact that we can experience and interpret stimuli in a manner that is nonliteral has given our species an unprecedentedly complex ability to comprehend what happens literally.
Our Ancestors Coming to Realize That They Can Interpret Sensory Stimuli in Ways Other Than Literal
How our ancestors came to understand symbols might have gone this way. There are animals that camouflage to avoid being eaten by predators. Jackson’s chameleons are an example. When an animal in front of you has camouflaged successfully, it means that you are looking at the animal literally in front of your face and yet you do not notice it. Rather, you misinterpret the animal as part of the scenery. And, of course, fiction is also not literal but only literary. Yet I argue that, to the degree that you are emotionally attached to an artwork, it largely rests upon your interpreting some aspects of the artwork you do deem to be true literally.
How Good Fiction Is True
W When I was in the fifth grade, my teacher waxed enthusiastically about how fiction is rich with symbolism. However, I still did not comprehend what that meant. When someone talked about symbolism in art, I thought it meant the artist being pretentious and purposely hard-to-understand.
What came to mind was a hipster splashing a blotch onto a canvas and announcing, “This is the human condition. This spatter of paint dramatizes the capitalist oppression of the masses.” But symbolism does not have to be that way. Alternatively, a deliberate symbol in a story is especially successful if it can be taken at face value as just part of the story while, on another level, it can be recognized as demonstrating something deeper at work. A case study in such symbolism is in Citizen Kane. Charles Foster Kane is married and he keeps getting richer. But his emotional bond to his wife is weakening. We are treated to a montage that shows, over the years, Kane eating dinner with his wife at a long table. Each spouse is on the other end of it. With each subsequent instance of such a scene, the table is longer and Kane is shown being even more callous toward his wife. If we take this only straightforwardly, it makes sense: we see that as Kane gets richer over the years, he can afford to purchase an even longer table. But this represents something more abstract: the growing length of the table represents the growing emotional distance between Kane and his wife.
Both because of the aforementioned obscurantism of many “modern artists,” and because I made the conflation that only that which is literal is real and true, I thought that symbols were all “fake” and too far from being straightforward. That is a variant on the fallacy discussed in the opening of this essay.
But when what you know to be a work of fiction is emotionally gripping to you and sticks with you, it is because you implicitly interpret that story to be true on a deeper level. My go-to example is the movie Back to the Future. We know that in real life, you cannot travel back in time in a DeLorean. But, in real life, people do have a difficult time relating with their parents and do wish there was a way to be able to meet them on mutual terms. In real life, nerds are subjected to bullying. Confronting these issues directly is usually so painful that we prefer to avoid them.
But when explorations of these issues are repackaged in a more-fantastical setting, that creates some degree of psychological distance that makes it more manageable, mood-wise, to confront them. George McFly does not exist on a literal level. But his story is a symbolic representation that gives us an idea of how we can address the topic of bullying: either continuing to submit to the bullies or stand up to them. The latter approach is riskier but it is ultimately more meaningful.
The first part of what Picasso said is misleading. Art is not a lie. Art is a symbolic representation. And not all symbolic representations are lies, just as an accurate painting of a male lion is not a lie even if the painting is not based on any one particular male lion. And when an artwork stirs your emotions, it is because you interpret it as a symbolic representation that faithfully conveys a principle that is true.
When a cherished memory of an artwork lingers in your mind, it is because, at least on some emotional level, you judge it implicitly as using symbols to convey a truth about human psychology.
As a result, Ayn Rand was correct to point out what a misnomer it is when good fantasy fiction is labeled “escapism,” an “escape” from the drudgery of reality. On the contrary, quality fantasy fiction is actually a method through which its fans confront their real-life problems.
Science communication consists of using nonliteral means to elucidate on what happens literally. Likewise, when you enjoy artwork, it is because, on some level, you experience it as a nonliteral means of dramatizing what you interpret to be true literally. That is why all realizations of the literal truth rely upon nonliteral symbolism.
Of course, I should also mention the many instances where symbolism, being misused, leads too many people down a path of falsehood and delusiveness. That is what happened when the psychological phenomenon of pareidolia contributed to belief in a literal God.
W When I was in the fifth grade, my teacher waxed enthusiastically about how fiction is rich with symbolism. However, I still did not comprehend what that meant. When someone talked about symbolism in art, I thought it meant the artist being pretentious and purposely hard-to-understand.
How Symbolic Thinking Misled Our Ancestors Into Believing in God and in Grandiose Conspiracies
Drawings are a good example of symbolic representation. It is why, as I said earlier, there are scientific wildlife artists whom scientists expect to be accurate and precise in the details by which they distinguish one species from similar ones in their depictions. I have written about this in another essay, one that refutes the cliché “Every artwork you think is ‘original’ actually still uses already-established conventions, and therefore originality has never existed in artwork or invention.” It has to do with the psychological phenomenon of pareidolia.
That returns us to the topic of creatures disguised as part of the background. Pareidolia is the flip side of camouflage. With camouflage, there is a creature or person or event literally within sight and yet it is interpreted as not being there. By contrast with pareidolia, a particular creature or person or event is not within sight literally and yet, at least on an initial level, it is interpreted as if it is there.
Pareidolia occurs even when our conscious minds do not come to the mistaken conclusion that our initial impression of the presence of a particular creature or person or event is something that is present literally. When I look at a cloud and say that it is shaped like a cat, I know the cloud is not literally a cat, but that still counts as pareidolia.
There have been many occasions in the history of our species, though, where people have indeed by tricked by pareidolia, believing that the illusion is something that is happening literally. Someone who said something important on this topic was the Enlightenment philosopher Constantin-François Chassebœuf de La Giraudais, the Comte de Volney (1757–1825). Recognizing the great informativeness of Volney’s book on religion, Thomas Jefferson himself orchestrated the American effort to translate it into English. In this same volume Volney is one of the relatively early examples of someone pointing out the role that pareidolia played in the emerge of belief in gods.
As our primate ancestors lived in groups, an important part of their evolution and natural selection involved the psychological phenomenon of “theory of mind.” This is also called cognitive empathy. This means that when you see someone’s behavior, you arrive at conclusions about that person’s emotional state. When the edges of a man’s mouth turn downward and he cries, and you recognize that as sadness, that is cognitive empathy. (If recognizing someone as sad makes you sad as well, that is affective empathy.) As members of groups among our ancestors both cooperated with, and conspired against, one another, it became important for them to try to interpret the emotions, thoughts, and motivations of others.
However, a side effect of this theory of mind, noted Volney, was that it did not end with a man trying to discern the emotions of other people. It also led to our ancestors trying to discern the emotional states of such non-human entities as boulders, volcanoes, rivers, and the wind. When a man gets aggressive and makes a lot of noise, we can ascertain that he is angry. Likewise, figured our ancestors, if the wind gets aggressive and makes a lot of noise in the form of a storm, it follows that the wind, too, must have gotten angry. Later generations of shamans decided that the wind itself is not an emotional entity but instead controlled directly by a hidden entity that still emotionally reacts to whether humans appease it or not.
That type of conclusion is called animism — the belief that there is consciousness or spirits in all objects. According to theorists such as Volney, that is the likely origin of our ancestors’ beliefs in spirits and gods. As Volney explains it,
...man began to perceive. The sun gave him light and warmth... ...judging every thing by comparison, and remarking in those beings [the weather and ecosystem] a motion spontaneous like his own, he supposed there be will, an intelligence inherent in that motion, of a nature similar to what existed in himself...And as explicated by psychologist Rob Brotherton, this is also the origin of grandiose conspiracy theories about how a cabal of billionaires controls everything in society. Often many of society’s problems, such as economic crises, are caused by the psychological phenomenon of specific people not feeling accountable when they work for large impersonal organizations that miscommunicate with other large impersonal organizations.
How Pareidolia Contributed to the Great Expansion of the Human Conceptual Faculty and All Human Reasoning
In my essay busting the cliché that “Nothing is original,” I iterated the anthropologists’ theory on how the first cave sculptures and cave paintings may have developed. The theory is that pareidolia was the initial inspiration. With sculpture, it went as follows. Inside a cave, someone noticed a rock formation that, in some part, already resembled something observed in life, such as a buffalo or a woman. However, this pioneering artist thought that the resemblance was incomplete. The pioneering artist consequently remolded the formation so that it would look even more like whatever the pioneering artist had in mind. If the finished product was a buffalo, that rock sculpture was a symbolic representation of real buffalo.
And something similar happened with cave paintings. Sometimes when dust particles of one type of mineral find their way on yet another type of mineral, the first type leaves marks on the second. Some pioneering painter saw a marking in a cave that partially resembled some sort of entity that this person recognized — again, something like a buffalo or a woman. That artist smeared the first type of mineral onto the cave wall so that the marking would resembled even more closely what that artist had envisioned. Hence, humanity gained its first pictures.
This theory is explicated in The History of Art by the father-and-son duo Horst Woldemar Janson and Anthony Hanson ({New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., [1962] 1995 5th ed. revised and expanded}, 51). And as of this writing, Izzy Wisher and her other associates in archaeology continue to expound upon it.
Furthermore, human-created pictures played a major role in the development of written language. As so often with innovation, it begam with commerce and the profit motive. Ancient people first bartered with one another and then agreed upon a common medium of exchange — the first money. Even in the Bronze Age, traders began paying for goods through installment plans. Trader 1 might provide Trader 2 half the desired quantity of bushels of wheat today for five cows, and provide the second half of the wheat in a month’s time. To commit themselves to carrying out the terms, the traders imprinted symbols into clay tablets. These symbols indicated the terms of the deal, making these documents the earliest known bookkeeping, accounting statements, and contracts.
Originally these symbols were pictograms — each a standardized and simplified picture indicating a type of object. One standardized picture could be for a cow and another a bushel of wheat. As the terms of these agreements grew more complex, the pictograms were not adequate to delineate the details and complexity of the concepts involved. The pictures represented objects that were relatively concrete and tangible. Eventually, to represent wider abstractions, the traders developed writing. Each written character consisted of lines that were much simpler than the pictograms’, but the simplified characters were combined to form words representing ideas of greater abstractness. The progression going from pictographs to writing was a progression going from more-basic concretes to more-complex abstractions. Stated differently: a word is worth a thousand pictures.
As eludicated by psychologist Neil Cohn, that is the same progression many a child undergo. Small children express their ideas through drawings in crayon. As they process and convey ideas of greater complexity and abstraction, they rely more on written language. In his book Who Ate the First Oyster?, Cody Cassidy lets us know how ingrained such imagery is in human cognition. He tells of still-existing hunter-gatherer bands making contact with Western anthropologists for the first time. Prior to meeting the anthropologists, these hunter-gatherers had never before seen any drawings in their lives, not even pictograms. Yet, as recorded by Janus B. Deregowski, when the anthropologists showed these hunter-gatherers various realistic drawings of native animals, the hunter-gatherers immediately recognized each animal portrayed in each drawing.
The phenomenon of pareidolia inspired the first picture art, and picture art was the first stage in the emergence of written language. And this was written language enabled human beings with a further-advanced and sophisticated method for processing the concepts through which they understand what happens literally. Hence, the nonliteral imagery of pareidolia contributed ultimately to the previously-unprecedented degrees of sophistication in our comprehension of that which is literal.
Thus, we find that when people take their beliefs in spirits and gods very literally, those people use symbolic representations to propagate a rather inaccurate understanding of reality. Yet, conversely, when children are shown artistic depictions of wildlife that get the details right, it is a symbolic representation that provides a very accurate understanding of reality. More to the point, this nonliteral representation assists people in understanding what happens literally. Ultimately, while symbolic representations can mislead people with arbitrary falsehoods, all accurate understanding of what happens literally is still contingent upon the proper — rational — methodology in symbolic representation that is inexorably nonliteral. Pareidolia is about “seeing” what isn’t there, and yet, in a roundabout manner, it has eventually contributed to our seeing what is there — and much more clearly than before.
As you are not Galileo literally, but your situation might become comparable to his in the relevant context, the use of Galileo as a symbol can convey to you and others the literal nature of your situation. Once again, presentations that are nonliteral can convey accurately a fact that is literal.
Yes, as words are tools of cognition and comprehending reality, that applies to language as a whole. I could eat something that kills me. My meal could poison me or cause me to choke to death. But in the end, it is the case that I eat to live. Likewise, people often use language to tell lies. But as language is instrumental to knowing reality at all, it is ultimately the case that language is the tool for learning, processing, and transmitting the truth. The same principle applies to imagination. As I have written before, the Wright brothers needed vibrant imaginations to conceive of the airplane. Imagination is imperative for deducing causal connections between separate events, and imperative for all long-term decision-making. As I said in my earlier essay, though people often use their imaginations to indulge in delusions, imagination is really the tool for adhering to reality.
That truth defies the nineteenth-century Romanticist poet William Blake. Blake famously disparaged scientists in general and Isaac Newton in particular. William Blake is one of the figures of history who popularized the misconception that because imagination can be used to conceive of the impossible, it is the case that imagination, which he regards as superior, is in opposition to rationality, which he denigrates as boring and humdrum. I rebut that assertion here. Not interested in points such as mine, Blake sniffs, “The idiot Reasoner laughs at the Man of Imagination.” But as imagination is integral to the scientific models and other symbols whereby we comprehend what happens literally in Nature, one must necessarily be a man of imagination to be a man of reason.
And now I can make an addition to all of the above. When a work of fiction especially resonates with you, it’s because, even if the fiction is fantastical in its depictions, some aspect of it implicitly struck you as being an effective symbolic representation of something you interpret to be an important literal truth about psychology in your real life. In effect, fiction is all about reality.
And that principle applies to the wider phenomenon of symbolism in general. In every instance where a fallacious argument is advanced, a falsehood is told, or a work of fiction gives a misleading impression about something from real life, it is a case where symbols are employed in a manner in which they obscure the truth. And, as I said earlier, hipsters have given us the impression that symbolism in art is about being nebulous and cryptic in message. But I hope I have established in this essay that, overall, symbolism in art and in science communication is ultimately about providing information and ideas with the utmost clarity.
On Sunday, October 19, 2025, I added the new sentences expressing how “Fiction is about reality.” On Monday, October 20, 2025, I added the quotation from William Blake and my commentary on him. On Tuesday, November 25, 2025, I added the sections about pareidolia leading to belief in God and to the first cave sculptures and cave paintings.
In my essay busting the cliché that “Nothing is original,” I iterated the anthropologists’ theory on how the first cave sculptures and cave paintings may have developed. The theory is that pareidolia was the initial inspiration. With sculpture, it went as follows. Inside a cave, someone noticed a rock formation that, in some part, already resembled something observed in life, such as a buffalo or a woman. However, this pioneering artist thought that the resemblance was incomplete. The pioneering artist consequently remolded the formation so that it would look even more like whatever the pioneering artist had in mind. If the finished product was a buffalo, that rock sculpture was a symbolic representation of real buffalo.
Even Factual Events Can Be Symbols
Even an account of true events can be a symbol. The story of the persecution of Galileo is a series of events that happened literally. But when people cite the example of Galileo, it is to present it as a case study of something that might still happen today. They are warning that, once again, there might be similar instances of someone being mistreated for telling the truth. As this happens, the account of Galileo and his punishment are symbols of similar injustices that might be repeated but should not be. What happened to Galileo, happened literally. But in the context of today’s society, you are not Galileo literally. Still, if there is a danger that you might be punished for speaking the truth, Galileo can be a fitting symbol for you and your situation. 
