by Wylie Sawyer, creator of Storybase Software for Writers
Now Available on the Kindle!
The Taxonomy of Human Experience (THE)
Preface
Every drama, including both fiction and non-fiction, can be broken down into a constellation of narrative elements that describe an entanglement of characters. And these narrative elements can be transcribed into language. Every moment of our lives can be described as one or more narrative “situations”. The Taxonomy of Human Experience (“THE”) is a new lexical semantic resource of 3968 universal narrative situations and a classification of the situations into a Mindset / Action framework that grounds meaning in terms of human experience.
While the dictionary demonstrates usage with a gloss of examples, THE illustrates the meanings of Mindset / Action concepts with a specialized gloss of narrative situations. This first eBook English 1.0 edition of THE is the small tip of a very large iceberg of possibility for future expanded and refined editions and for translation into other languages and other digital platforms. It is my hope that this eBook edition will help to attract the enthusiasm and support that will be necessary for THE to fully blossom into a standardized universal lexical semantic “Rosetta Stone” that engenders cognitive empathy across cultures and languages.
All of us create stories as we form a mental model of the phenomena of our lives where we are the sole audience and primary character of our own story. We all have this inner world, this singular viewpoint, this individuated experience of our own life. And we tell stories to each other - to our friends, neighbors, spouses, parents, children and siblings, as we try to form a coherent picture of what is going on and present ourselves as a coherent personality.
In the field of clinical psychology there are therapeutic models that aim to help patients to recognize the distorted ways in which we interpret the stories of our own lives. It is my hope that THE will prove useful in the context of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) where it can help patients to explore the stories of their own lives and glimpse new possibilities for understanding their own life story.
In the field of artificial intelligence there is great possibility for super intelligent systems that can help to alleviate suffering, but the wisdom of these systems will be limited in part by the beauty and validity of their semantic base layers. With collective global effort from various disciplines of the cognitive, linguistic and social sciences, THE can be curated into such a universal base layer, and it is my hope to find a way forward that ensures that such a project is established in the right way for the greater good.
But most of all, THE is a powerful creative resource for fiction writers. As described in the Acknowledgements section below, THE is a refined and updated version of the corpus that was the basis of Storybase Software for Writers, the bestselling software program that helped thousands of professional and amateur writers to create countless novels, plays and screenplays.
This eBook edition of THE provides over 2000 hyperlinks that facilitate the systematic use of the corpus as a dynamic reference tool during the process of constructing character arcs and story threads. As described more fully in the How to Use section, writers can use THE to develop authentic, believable, entangled characters as the foundation for compelling stories that will grab and hold an audience.
According to Wikipedia, the "barred thorn" was used to abbreviate "the" in the Old English language.