Episode 9.17: Truth as the most productive of the available fictions; illustrations from science.

As an alternative to regarding truth as the best we can do right now, but not a a way that is a contradiction to it, we can also regard truth as the most productive of the available fictions. The more we think about the way we describe the world, even in science, the more we come to the conclusion that it is just one fiction after another. The question then being not whether something is or is not a fiction but whether and to what extent it is a useful fiction, where useful is to be construed in some way chosen by us.