The Myths We Live By

In the AI Story

The book's central claim is that science cannot function without myths in the generous sense — without imaginative structures that orient inquiry, determine what counts as salience, and give researchers the pre-theoretical sense of what kind of thing they are investigating. The myth of the universe as clockwork organized seventeenth-century physics. The myth of life as struggle organized nineteenth-century biology. The myth of mind as computation organizes twenty-first-century cognitive science. Each myth was productive. Each was also, once inflated beyond its productive scope, obscuring.

The problem is not that scientists have myths. The problem is that the myths have been mistaken for findings — that the imaginative structures orienting inquiry have been confused with the conclusions of that inquiry. When Richard Dawkins describes genes as 'selfish,' he is deploying a myth. The myth organizes certain productive hypotheses. But when the myth is received by readers as a description of reality — as a claim that living things really are, at bottom, selfish — the myth has done work that no scientific finding authorizes.

The book extends this analysis across several domains. Chapter 2 examines the myth of the social contract and how it has shaped political philosophy. Chapter 4 treats the machine image of the universe. Chapter 6 addresses the selfish gene directly. Chapter 8, most relevant to AI, examines the myth of salvation through science — the quasi-religious narrative in which technology will eventually deliver humanity from suffering, death, and the limits of embodied existence. Midgley finds this narrative everywhere in popular science writing and especially in the rhetoric surrounding artificial intelligence.

The method of the book is diagnostic rather than polemical. Midgley does not argue that the myths she identifies are false. She argues that they have been mistaken for something other than what they are — that the imaginative has been confused with the empirical, and the confusion produces specific pathologies in public reasoning. The book is a manual for recognizing these confusions in one's own thinking and in the thinking of the culture.

Origin

Published by Routledge in 2003, the book developed arguments Midgley had been refining since Beast and Man (1978). It followed directly from Science and Poetry (2001), which had argued for the complementarity of scientific and poetic descriptions, and extended that argument into an analysis of how myths function within science itself. The book was written for a general audience and remains her most accessible articulation of the framework.

Key Ideas

Myths as imaginative infrastructure. Every worldview rests on framing narratives that are not themselves testable but determine what testing means.

Invisibility from inside. The most powerful myths are the ones not recognized as myths — experienced as reality itself.

Productive vs. inflated myths. A myth is productive when it orients inquiry; it becomes inflated when it is mistaken for the conclusion of inquiry.

Science needs myths. Against positivist pretensions that science operates without imaginative structures, Midgley insists the structures are indispensable — and that naming them is the only way to prevent their misuse.

Debates & Critiques

Some critics argued Midgley's use of 'myth' was unnecessarily provocative and that the phenomena she described could be more neutrally called 'paradigms' or 'frameworks.' She resisted the substitution. 'Paradigm' sounds academic and controllable. 'Myth' names the emotional, imaginative, quasi-religious dimension of the structures she was describing — the way they grip people beneath the level of explicit belief. The provocation was the point.