{"pk":49802,"title":"Sense-Making, Cultural Scripts, and the Inferential Basis of Meaningful Experience","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Cognitive science has made great progress in understanding how we explain and make sense of a complex world. We lack, however, an account of a deeper notion: how an experience that makes sense can become one that is meaningful. We present an account of how explanation and sense-making can lead to meaning-making, by the use—and, crucially, re-use—of a small set of cultural scripts: explanatory complexes that can be shared across domains by members of a social group. We explain meaning-making as a process of inference in which an individual leverages these cultural scripts to segment their full, unstructured set of experiences into a form that can be understood and endorsed as significant. Our account suggests how cultural artifacts (particularly stories in the form of novels, plays, and movies) are crucial for the transmission of these scripts. We present a mathematical model of this inferential process that can account for a range of phenomena which typically resist formalization. This includes the importance of narratives in meaning-making, the difficulty of articulating meaning separately from experiences that encapsulate it, and the ways in which the standard interpretation of a stable cultural artifact can change radically over time.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Humanities; Aesthetics; Cognitive Humanities; Event cognition; Mathematical modeling"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/37w2603j","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Cody","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kommers","name_suffix":"","institution":"The Alan Turing Institute","department":""},{"first_name":"Simon","middle_name":"","last_name":"DeDeo","name_suffix":"","institution":"Carnegie Mellon University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49802/galley/37764/download/"}]}