Foundations for
Meaning and Understanding
in Human-centric AI

Luc Steels editor

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>
MUHAI

Meaning and Understanding in Human-centric AI

# Foundations for Meaning and Understanding in Human-centric AI

**Editor**

Luc Steels (VIU)

**Contributors**

Inès Blin (CSL)

Anna Morbiato (VIU)

Carlo Santagiustina (VIU)

Luc Steels (VIU)

Lise Stork (VUA)

Annette Ten Teije (VUA)

Ilaria Tiddi (VUA)

Remi van Trijp (CSL)

Oscar Vilarroya (IMIM)
Edited by Luc Steels, Venice International University

Cover Graphic Design - studio +fortuna, Trieste

Published by Venice International University, Isola di San Servolo 30133 Venice, Italy

Open Access: https://zenodo.org/communities/muhai/

Citation:

Steels, L. (ed.) Foundations for Meaning and Understanding in Human-centric AI.
Venice International University, Venice.

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6602456

Volume published in the framework of the MUHAI project, which has received funding
from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under
grant agreement No 951846. It reflects only the authors' view and the Commission is
not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

This publication is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
license, providing Open Access through zenodo.org. Copyrights for all articles and
figures are retained by their authors or copyright holders. You can freely share, adapt
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been inadvertently overlooked the editors will be pleased to include any necessary
credits in any subsequent reissue or edition.

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

This project has received funding from the European
Pathfinder Project under Grant Agreement N 951846
# Executive Summary

The MUHAI consortium studies how it is possible to build AI systems that rest on meaning and understanding. We call this kind of AI **meaningful AI** in contrast to AI that rests exclusively on the use of statistically acquired pattern recognition and pattern completion.

Because meaning and understanding are rather vague and overloaded notions there is no obvious research path to achieve it. The consortium has therefore set up a task early on in the project to explore how understanding is being discussed and treated in other human-centred research fields, more specifically in social brain science, social psychology, linguistics, semiotics, economics, social history and medicine.

Our explorations have yielded a wealth of insights: about understanding in general and the role of narratives in this process, about possible applications of meaningful AI in a diverse set of human-centred fields, and about the technology gaps that need to be plugged to achieve meaningful AI.

This volume summarizes the outcome of our consultations. It has three main parts:

I. A general introduction,

II. A series of chapters reporting on what understanding means in various human-centered research fields other than AI,

III. A short conclusion identifying key research topics for meaning-based human-centric AI.

Our explorations have yielded a wealth of insights: about understanding in general and the role of narratives in this process, about possible applications of meaningful AI in a diverse set of human-centred fields, and about the technology gaps that need to be plugged to achieve meaningful AI.
# Contents

## 1 Towards Meaningful

### Human-Centric AI

#### Luc Steels

5

1.1 Introduction 5

1.2 What is the distinction between reactive and deliberative intelligence? 8

1.3 Are reactive and deliberative intelligence both needed for AI? 10

1.4 What is understanding? 12

1.5 What are meanings? 13

1.6 Why is understanding hard? 16

1.7 What are digital twins? 20

1.8 What are narrative-based models? 21

1.9 How are narratives studied in other disciplines? 24

## 2 From Narrative Economics to Economists' Narratives

#### Carlo Santagiustina

29

2.1 Introduction 30

2.2 Economic narratives: tying societal discourse and economic decisions 35

2.3 On the role of economists' narratives: (Re)defining the boundaries of Narrative Economics 41

2.4 Conclusion 43

## 3 Narratives in Historical Sciences

#### Remi van Trijp, Inès Blin

45

3.1 Introduction 45

3.2 Particular and Embedded Narratives 46

3.3 Fabula, Plot, and Narrative 53
<table><tr><td>3.4 Case Study on the French Revolution</td><td>58</td></tr><tr><td>3.5 Conclusion</td><td>65</td></tr></table>

4 Clinical Narratives for Causal Understanding in Medicine

<table><tr><td>Lise Stork, Ilaria Tiddi, Annette ten Teije</td><td>67</td></tr><tr><td>4.1 Introduction</td><td>67</td></tr><tr><td>4.2 Clinical Narratives</td><td>69</td></tr><tr><td>4.3 An AI Perspective on Clinical Narratives</td><td>72</td></tr><tr><td>4.4 Clinical Narratives in Human-centric AI</td><td>75</td></tr><tr><td>4.5 Conclusions</td><td>79</td></tr></table>

5 Narratives in social neuroscience

<table><tr><td>Oscar Vilarroya</td><td>81</td></tr><tr><td>5.1 Introduction</td><td>81</td></tr><tr><td>5.2 The adaptive function of narratives</td><td>82</td></tr><tr><td>5.3 Narratives in social cognition</td><td>84</td></tr><tr><td>5.4 Negative consequences of social narratives</td><td>86</td></tr><tr><td>5.5 Conclusions</td><td>91</td></tr></table>

6 Narrative Art Interpretation

<table><tr><td>Luc Steels</td><td>93</td></tr><tr><td>6.1 Introduction</td><td>93</td></tr><tr><td>6.2 An example of a narrative interpretation</td><td>97</td></tr><tr><td>6.3 The hermeneutic spiral</td><td>101</td></tr><tr><td>6.4 Steps towards computational models</td><td>103</td></tr><tr><td>6.5 Conclusions</td><td>106</td></tr></table>

7 Pragmatics of Narration with Language

<table><tr><td>Anna Morbiato</td><td>109</td></tr><tr><td>7.1 Introduction</td><td>110</td></tr><tr><td>7.2 Chafe and the Pear Stories</td><td>112</td></tr><tr><td>7.3 Conclusions</td><td>121</td></tr></table>

8 Conclusions

<table><tr><td>Luc Steels</td><td>123</td></tr></table>
<table><tr><td>8.1 Main insights</td><td>123</td></tr><tr><td>8.2 Prior Art</td><td>125</td></tr><tr><td>8.3 Key issues for narrative-based AI</td><td>126</td></tr><tr><td>8.4 Conclusions</td><td>129</td></tr></table>
# Chapter 2

## From Narrative Economics to Economists' Narratives
Carlo Santagiustina

### Abstract

In the last decade, there has been an increasing interest among economists, policy advisors and social scientists for narratives, and for their role in relation to consumers' and citizens' decision-making processes, public agenda-setting, policy making as well as its explanation and justification to the general public. In particular, a growing body of literature shows that narratives related to socio-economic issues of collective interest, like inequality, play a concrete -if not crucial- role in the evolution of observed socio-economic phenomena and related policies. In this work, we review literature from economics and neighboring fields to identify key di erences among alternative approaches to the study of narratives. Second, we highlight the strategic role of narra- tives and their ubiquity in relation to the di erent phases of agents' decisional processes. Finally, we discuss the relation between narratives by academic researchers and narratives that spread among the general public or on the me- dia. This, to appraise the endogeneity of social and economic research activity in socio-economic narratives dynamics, and to better understand their role in governance systems. This work suggests that the power of narrative extends well beyond their observed virality in the news and in social media, and that narratives' impact is a foundational aspect of humans' way of making sense of their surrounding reality, also in the economic domain.

### Keywords

economics, narrative economics, economists' narratives, economic discourse
2.1 Introduction

**Seeking the roots of narrative economics.** It is no accident that the expression *narrative economics* was used more than a century ago in Palgrave’s *Dictionary of Political Economy*, to refer to a method for constructing an economic explanation of historical events. Interestingly, in the first Volume of this dictionary, under the heading of **EXPERIENCE** (Palgrave [1894, p. 790-791]), it is stated that:

> "An economist strictly deductive in method could never get beyond his first premises. The contrary seems possible because the economist who apparently deduces everything from first principles in reality weaves into his argument statements of fact and wide generalisations which have become so familiar that he and his readers forget how they were first acquired. Nor has there ever yet existed an economist who merely observed and recorded. [...] The writing of history involves processes of selection, comparison, and inference, in which the historian's mind is active. No two persons perform these processes in quite the same way [...] It is not merely that historians often infuse their work with their own political or religious sentiments, with the prejudices of their own age or their own class. It is rather that the historian cannot construct a narrative out of facts without interpreting those facts. But he cannot interpret the facts without using his mind, without adding to, or rather, without transforming, those facts.
> The object of all science, including political economy, is not merely to amass facts but also to explain them."

As Palgrave’s words suggest, economic narratives are representational constructs that humans incessantly construct, employ and transform for explaining facts, for reasoning about economic events of collective interest, and about their patterns across space and time. As we will try to illustrate through this work, narrative’s generalizations mentioned by Palgrave are, among others, necessary for rapidly categorizing and making sense of what we experience on a daily basis as individuals and groups that operate through complex market and socio-economic systems, and by so doing reduce uncertainty. As such narratives play a significant role in aggregating, and (possibly) learning from, common experiences and recurrent and seemingly related sequences of economic events. Through their rhetorical constructions (Phelan [1996]; Kirkwood [1992]; Rodden [2008]), narratives select, combine, (re)frame, and historicize mixtures of events, actions, choices and preferences that are believed to depend on one another. Despite economic narratives tend to be (more or less) homomorphic to the evidence and relations they describe, when recalled, they can distort and blur our experiencing of the economic world (Keusch, Bollen, and Hassink [2012]), while projecting sensory experiences and data into the realm of cognition, via natural and formal languages. Narratives are intermediate cognitive (and meta-cognitive) goods (Scholz [2018]), which can be analyzed, used, transformed, transferred, and conserved for a multiplicity of practical or epistemic purposes. For example, stock market narratives in specialized news can be used by investors to rapidly interpret the causes of recent changes in market trends and react accordingly, or to predict the likelihood of the intervention
of the Federal Trade Commission in a merger between firms which could damage consumers, or to persuade EU citizens and investors that a the a non-standard monetary policy employed by the European Central Bank will succeed in limiting inflation to its targeted value, given a claimed set of dependencies linking the newly employed policy levers to inflation. Narratives can be more or less economically relevant and impactful, depending on their diusion, content and persuasive power, which is often derived from their rhetorical strategy and believability, the authority of their declaimers and supporters, their fitness to a scope, the salience of their message or implicit recommendation with respect to the situation in which, and audience with whom, they are employed for informing or conditioning decision-making processes.

**The process of constructing a narrative out of facts.** Narrativization is the mechanism through which human beings chain their individual and collective experiences together through language (White 1981). Not only from a temporal perspective but also from a causal point of view. This activity can be done at the individual level, for example, to make-sense of a higher than expected electricity bill, or at the group level, for example, to convene on a narrative for explaining to European consumers today's EU reliance on natural gas imported from Russia. Clearly, languages through which economic narratives are built encompass natural languages, but also embrace applied mathematics (Mary S Morgan 2001), statistics (Dumez and Jeunemaitre 2006) and all other symbolical representations of the real-world and of its phenomena, including (symbolic) behavior (Brown 1986).

**Economic narratives in action.** As shown in Figure 2.1, which displays a Twitter post about the relation between the facial expression of the photographed trader with upcoming NYSE trends, even a simple tweet can combine dierent mediums and visual languages for creating a unifying (re)construction of specific situations or events, and of their relation, also called a narrative.

As observed by (Zaloom 2003), *"the body language of the trader, who may be steadily and confidently holding his hands forward in engagement with the market or yelling his bids, spittle flying and eyes wide, in desperation to get out of a trade, are crucial inflections that traders draw on to form market judgments"* . Regardless of its unconditional veracity, if this narrative is sufficiently di used in the traders community and *"inflections"* (like the one shown in Figure 2.1) are considered crucial for forming market judgments by market operators, then, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy (Merton 1948), the relation described by the narrative may well become a (conditionally true) mechanism driving the market. As for the Keynesian beauty contest, in the economic world, it is the belief in, and coordination through, a narrative that often makes its claims become true (Tuckett and Tuckett 2011).
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2.1: Examples of stock-market related Twitter post containing a narrative, claiming that forthcoming market trends of the NYSE can be “known” by looking to one of the most photographed traders (Peter Tuchman) depicted in the image attached to the tweet. Tweet link: https://twitter.com/Albannay/status/978380005087633409</figcaption></figure>

**Purposes and contexts of narrativization.** Even though the reasons for which narratives are created, employed and shared in real-life situations are innumerable, some of their usages are more relevant than others to economists and other social scientists. In this respect, there has been a recent focus on how narratives can (i) prime and nudge individuals and groups (Heath, Lee, and Lemon 2019), for example, in relation to their goals (Laham and Kashima 2013); (ii) frame decision- and sense-making processes (Steinhardt and Shapiro 2015; Hullman and Diakopoulos 2011); (iii) influence memory recall (Thorndyke 1977) and information salience (Dolan et al. 2012); and (iv) coordinate group behaviors, identities, and declared preferences (Lebano and Jamieson 2020).

In liberal and democratic societies, where the justification and explanation of individual and collective choices is a relevant aspect of daily life and deliberations (Boswell 2013), narrativity has become the (default) means through which people's representations, expectations and choices are coordinated via horizontal communication.

Narratives are especially important in decentralised or non-hierarchical systems, like markets and social media, because coordination and alignment cannot be therein imposed. As
a result, narrative constructions have become fundamental ingredients in those processes whose success depends on voluntary coordination and compliance with recommendations. Like vaccination choices (Abeysinghe 2015; Poltorak et al. 2005) or the adoption of socially and environmentally sustainable behaviors and investment choices. Moreover, since narratives can affect expectations (Svetlova 2021), and expectations can stabilize or destabilize economies and drive major events (G. W. Evans and Honkapohja 2012), one would expect them to be subject to close scrutiny by economists.

**Why have narratives been stigmatized in economics?** Regardless of their relevance, until recently, works focusing on economic narratives have been mostly neglected by economists and top ranked economic journals, with few exceptions like Ahern and Sosyura 2014; Ashenfelter 2012; C. D. Romer and D. H. Romer 2004; C. D. Romer and D. H. Romer 2010. I hypothesize that this is mainly due to two reasons, illustrated here below.

First, narratives have been often stigmatized and considered a taboo in the economic field because they are seen as being related to subjectivity, interpretative arbitrariness, measurement difficulties, and the impossibility to derive (universal) economic laws from evidence. Especially in economic departments culturally akin to the so-called *Laissez Faire* philosophy, researchers have been taking part to a coordinated effort to generalize, extend and test neoclassical economic models and their assumptions. Possibly seeking the perceived scientific authority (Bijker, R. Bal, and Hendriks 2009) granted to natural sciences (Copeland 1931), like physics (Pikler 1954; Pikler 1955; Walker 1991; Mirowski 1991) and engineering (Ekelund et al. 1999), different generations of *Chicagoan* researchers (Miller Jr 1962) contributed to the building of the edifice of contemporary economics, mostly through accrual and non-disruptive contributions to the neoclassical paradigm. Such a theoretical edifice, by being mathematically sound, would hypothetically allow the economic discipline to ensure the benefits granted by the so-called hard science approach (Godechot 2011; Keen 2001), including status and research funding (Fourcade 2009). As a result, during this quantitative turn where every scientific dispute had to be resolved by formal demonstrations or statistical tests, the idea of studying seemingly soft issues (G. A. Akerlof 2020), such as narratives, was probably considered an inconvenient or too risky move to most economists, which are by training accustomed to assess career incentives and funding prospects conditional on the research paths they undertake (Harris et al. 1959).

Second, acknowledging the role and effects of narratives in economic processes and outcomes would have been equivalent to admit that (also) economic research, its policy implications and related narratives can affect (for the better or the worst) the systems that they describe; with all the resulting socio-political and economic implications and responsibilities, which academic researchers most likely prefer not to confront with.

As a result, even though narratives have always been known (unknowns) in economics, before the pioneering work by Deirdre McCloskey (McCloskey 1983), narratives were
broadly considered marginal issues, transient noises, incommensurable or unobservable
variables, or negligible ‘Blah Blah Blah’; whose meaning could not be deciphered given the
lack of methods for identifying, extracting, interpreting, aggregating, and modeling them.
By neglecting the role of narratives in economics, economists were implicitly assuming that
narratives (of any type) couldn’t significantly affect the state of economic and financial
systems they were studying, nor influence their dynamics. As we will see, this extremely
strong assumption has been proven to be incorrect through many economic applications.

**The digital revolution: a precondition for an empirical narrative turn?** In the last two decades, the rapid growth of the World Wide Web and the progressive digitization of our socio-economic life (DiMaggio et al. 2001), together with the theoretical and methodological advances in knowledge representation (Van Harmelen, Lifschitz, and Porter 2008), cognitive linguistics and AI (Lippi and Torroni 2016; V. Evans 2009; Duchan, Bruder, and L. E. Hewitt 2012; Luc Steels 2011), have transformed discourse and narratives into latent evidence, which, with the appropriate techniques, can be captured and transformed into standardized information structures, and used for modeling, forecasting (or simply describing) socio-economic systems and their information environments.

During this digital shift, there has been a growing attention, also in economics, to sto-
ries (R. Akerlof, Matouschek, and Rayo 2020), narratives (Robert J. Shiller 2017), public
discourse (Ferrara et al. 2021), and their effects in real world economic and social sys-
tems. Through this growing body of research, it has been found that narratives are
important in relation to policy making (Cherif, Engher, and Hasanov 2020), justification
(Gaur and Kant 2021), legitimization (E. Hewitt 2020), and compliance (Mintrom et al.
2021). This attention has also prompted the emergence of *narrative economics* (Robert J
Shiller 2020) as a new paradigm for doing socioeconomic research, by focusing on peo-
ple’s communicated views about the functioning of economic systems, the determinants of
economic outcomes, and the causes and consequences of economic events. This research
has also raised questions regarding the methods, evidence-collection procedures and mod-
eling paradigms that should guide economists and other social scientists in integrating
narratives and discourses into their research fields (Meng 2021).

**Structure of the work.** The sections that follow provide an overview of the emerg-
ing field of narrative economics, and of economic narratives’ life-cycle and ecosystem.
Highlighting how they are crafted and used to influence sense- and decision-making pro-
cesses, at the individual and collective level. In section 2.2, I review how different research
streams have defined and studied narratives in relation to economics. In section 2.3, I
further explore the role of scholars in the generation and disusion of economic narratives.
Finally, in section 2.4 I summarize the most relevant implications of narrative research in
economics and human-centric studies.
## 2.2 Economic narratives: tying societal discourse and economic decisions

“If you listen to the noise of the market, you won’t buy anything.” (African proverb)

**Characterizing economic narratives.** Even though the word *narrative* is often (mis)used as a synonym of *story*, *anecdote*, or *discourse* in economics, from an epistemic perspective narratives are very di erent from the latter, mainly because, as pointed out by (Boswell 2013), they operate at an intermediate level between personal anecdotes and public dis- courses, constraining agency by limiting the possible ways of viewing an economic issue or knowing an economic event.

In particular, narratives are systems of purposefully selected and framed (anecdotal or factual) evidence, which, by being causally and sequentially related in a plot, contain emergent meanings and abstractable teachings, which suggest a specific stance or (re)action in relation to the described economic issue or event. The *raison d’être* of economic narratives is not merely to describe something related to the world of economic a airs, but also to suggest something to do, or to think, in relation to what is described. Strategically designed economic narratives can serve as understanding recommendations (or knowledge primers). Narratives can be instrumental to the di usion of non-exhaustive representa- tions of (economic) evidence, tailored to meet the “doxastic preferences” (Baltag and Smets 2013) of specific individuals or groups. For this reason, especially in economics, narratives should be always analyzed as means rather than ends, which can be employed, when considered convenient to do so, for justifying, motivating, explaining or encouraging specific ways of thinking, behaving, and expecting.

Processes of narrativization imply a (non-casual) selection of situations and events, ex-
perienced by oneself and/or others, to be linked in a plot, as Figure 2.2 shows, di
erent
narratives can be constructed from the same evidence set. The way in which situations
and events are selected and linked together is often conditional on, and instrumental to
the end purpose for which a narrator creates or spreads a specific narrative. For example,
the plot in Figure 2.2 could be used to explain why a general consultation resulted from
specific choices, situations and events through which a group of individuals had to do
with each other, in a (seemingly) strategic way. However, the process of “cherry picking”
evidence (Fox and Hoch 2005) for building a narrative, even if carried out strategically
(Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, and Roselle 2014; Van Noort 2017; Freedman 2015; Miskim-
mon, O’Loughlin, and Roselle 2015), is not necessarily rational (Elster 1979), as it may
be a ected by heuristics and biases (Tversky and Daniel Kahneman 1974; Daniel Kah-
neman et al. 1982) that are typical of judgment under uncertainty, like the anchoring,
adjustment, representativeness, and availability heuristics. Many of the heuristics that
have been found to influence decision-making can also influence the construction of nar-
ratives. This is important because if cognitive biases, possibly a ecting in a negative way
decision-makers, can be first identified by studying narratives, irrational decisions could
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2.2: Narrativization processes and emergent narrative structure</figcaption></figure>

be possibly anticipated or avoided. The relation between cognitive biases revealed through
narratives and biases in decision making, opens the way to a promising research area, that
of the forecasting of (individual or collective) behavioral biases through the analysis of
narratives and their dynamics. For example, one could try to anticipate irrational col-
lective behavior by looking to the dynamics of narratives about collective risks that may
be socially amplified through communication on social media (Iacopini and Carlo R.M.A.
Santagiustina 2021).

**Narratives as uncertainty avoidance tools.** As explained by (Tuckett and Tuckett 2011), narratives can be seen as tools for reducing uncertainties by constraining people's freedom of representation:

> "The word narrative has two etymological roots – telling (narrare) and ‘knowing in some particular way’ (gnarus). The two are so intertwined they cannot be untangled. Bruner (J. S. Bruner 2003) uses this point to summarise the importance of narrative particularly for giving us ready and supple means for dealing with the uncertain outcomes of our plans and anticipations – citing Aristotle to note that the impetus to narrative is expectation gone awry – peripeteia, or trouble. Among other possible functions, narratives provide a vocabulary of meaning to support and legitimate action and to deal with misfortune."

By (self-)limiting the possible ways of viewing the world, shared narratives that are suf-
ficiently stable across time can give relief to the overwhelming process of contemplation
of the complexity and variety of real world experiences and perceptions, which, by inspir-
ing a multiplicity of inconsistent feelings and representations, may otherwise give rise to
uncertainties (Carlo R.M.A. Santagiustina 2018), to which individuals are averse to.

To reduce uncertainty, people can use (individually and collectively) their imagination,
culture and episodic memories to anchor their world-views and expectations to existing
structural constraints, in a way that is instrumental to the fulfillment and justification of
their preferences and objectives (see Figure 2.3). These representations and expectations
are then put to the scrutiny of the community or/and co-deciders in the form of narratives,
which jointly explain and justify a plan of action and its (claimed) end(s). By so doing,
narrativized relations between past, current and future situations are shared in social
networks and hence embedded into the socio-cultural context of the decision-makers.
Under this perspective, via social, cultural and personal frames, narratives bind possible
futures to contingent structural constraints.

Based on these socially-constructed representations people may feel more comfortable
in taking decisions in a condition of objective uncertainty. These decisions may both
consist in taking or postponing choices and actions, in accordance to the unfolding of the
narrativized “plan of action”. As a result, narratives allow people to act “according to or
despite the uncertainty they face” (Vignoli et al. 2020).

**Collective Economic Narratives.** In order to solidify the foundations of narrative economics, a definition of Collective Economic Narratives (CEN) has recently been proposed in (Roos and Reccius 2021). According to this definition a CEN is “*a sense-making
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2.3: the Narrative Framework, image inspired from Fig.2 in (Vignoli et al. 2020)</figcaption></figure>

*story about some economically relevant topic that is shared by members of a group, emerges and proliferates in social interaction, and suggests actions*".

Despite the arguable (and loose) usage of the word *story*, the above definition highlights some important functional and substantial aspects of narratives, as seen from an economists' perspective, which are summarized in the box here below.

## Collective Economic Narratives (from Roos and Reccius 2021)

1. ARE SENSE MAKING TOOLS: *"In a social context, sense-making can mean that a justification for behavior is given. [...] Sense-making requires that the story connects to the belief systems of the involved people. We use the term belief system in a broad sense here, including mental models and normative, evaluative, a ective and motivational elements"*.

2. LINK ECONOMIC PHENOMENA: *"Economists are not interested in language per se, but only with regard to its relation to their main objects of inquiry such as the economic activities of production and consumption"*.
3. CONTAIN LATENT MEANINGS: "A narrative may transport subtext in addition to what is said explicitly and directly. The subtext appeals to the underlying belief system [...] their meaning and the relation to other topics are just implied and must be completed by the listener".

4. EMERGE THROUGH COMPLEX INTERACTIONS: "Nobody who tells a story to others can know exactly which parts of the story make sense to them and which do not [...] In the end, a group narrative is left that nobody thought of in this way and that nobody could predict, hence it emerged".

5. ARE SUBJECT TO EVOLUTIONARY PRESSURE: "The narrative of a group might be challenged by members of other groups that maintain di erent belief systems. Di erent groups [...] may have an incentive to di erentiate their narratives [...] The evolution of a group narrative depends in complex ways on the participants and the rules and practices of the inter-group discourse".

6. ARE USED TO SUGGEST OR FACILITATE ECONOMIC ACTION: "Suggesting what to do in an uncertain world is another interpretation of sensemaking [...] people often have a desire to act, even though the knowledge basis for rational decision-making is rather small [...] This idea has some similarity to Keynes' concept of animal spirits – defined as spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction".

As identified by Roos and Reccius, economic narratives serve to form behavioral scripts and cognitive categories at the group or community level that facilitate coordination, as well as sense- and decision-making processes. These scripts and categories are not neces- sarily based on objective reality, and may be the product of experiences and impressions that are subject to negotiation and change within a group or at the community level.

Through a case-study on the role of narratives in the Soviet Union (G. A. Akerlof and Snower 2016), Akerlof and Snower come to similar conclusions. In their view, narratives play a key role in focusing attention and activating memories and motivations, especially at the collective level. According to the two economists, these shared meaning construc- tions, by providing simple mental models of causal and social relations, can establish, maintain or change power relationships, also producing a strong influence on economic and political decisions. In particular, since people make choices with regard to a domain of possibilities that lies within their field of attention, and narratives act as attention filters at the societal level, they constrain people’s domain of perceived possibilities, informing, guiding and limiting action at the aggregate level.

The aforementioned approaches to economic narratives are closely related to complexity economics literature, in particular to an emerging stream of research which sees the econ- omy “not as a system in equilibrium but as one in motion, perpetually ‘computing’ itself – perpetually constructing itself anew” (Arthur 2014).
**Research on CEN, with a focus on socio-economic inequality.** Since the late 1980s, a growing body of economic research has started investigating the effects of narratives on economic phenomena, and their role in the formation of preferences and justification of economic policy and experts' recommendations. Research fields that were affected by this narrative turn include development studies (Palvia, Baqir, and Nemati 2018; Lewis, Rodgers, and Woolcock 2014; Gatrell and Reid 2017; Titumir 2021; Chan 2014), economic history (Ferguson-Cradler 2021; Eichengreen 2012; Kitromilides 2013), decision theory (Jerome Bruner 1990; G. A. Akerlof and Snower 2016; G. A. Akerlof 2020; R. Akerlof, Matouschek, and Rayo 2020; Singer 2015), microeconomics (Preece and Kerrigan 2015; Safari and Thilenius 2013; Hume and Mills 2013; Morrell and Jayawardhena 2010), macroeconomics (Tilly, Ebner, and Livan 2021; Robert J. Shiller 2017; C. D. Romer and D. H. Romer 2004; C. D. Romer and D. H. Romer 2010; Rojas, Vegh, and Vuletin 2020), finance (Hall 2006; Nyman, Kapadia, and Tuckett 2021; Teeter and Sandberg 2017; Iacopini and Carlo R.M.A. Santagiustina 2021; Costola, Iacopini, and Carlo R.M.A. Santagiustina 2021a), environmental and sustainability economics (Van Der Leeuw 2020; Béné et al. 2019; Bauer et al. 2017; Saltelli et al. 2020; Maller, Horne, and Dalton 2012). Given the scope of this work, we will here focus on development studies related to socio-economic inequality. For a more general overview of the role of narratives in other economic fields and related empirical works, we refer the reader to (Roos and Reccius 2021; Robert J Shiller 2020; Ferguson-Cradler 2021).

In development studies, it has been found that narratives can play an important role in determining the perception of and tolerance to different forms of economic and social inequalities (Gaur and Kant 2021; Larsen 2016).

For example, Gaur and Kant (2021) have identified and described a set of channels through which economic narratives can affect the implementation and impact of economic policies, like wealth redistribution policies, and alter people's wealth distribution preferences, possibly leading to further concentration of wealth and power. According to the aforementioned authors, institutions, media, and technology play a key role in creating, validating, or disseminating narratives that justify (or condemn) specific forms of socio-economic inequality. Hence, their impact is not neutral, and they can indirectly exacerbate inequalities, creating what the authors call “narrative-driven inequality”. The concentration of wealth can be too such an extent facilitated by collective narratives, that under some conditions, these can determine a perpetual concentration of wealth through self-reinforcing mechanisms (see Figure 2.4).
<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2.4: Linkages among wealth, power, narratives, media, and peoples’ perception, image from (Gaur and Kant 2021)</figcaption></figure>

## 2.3 On the role of economists’ narratives: (Re)defining the boundaries of Narrative Economics

It has been claimed (Nakai 2020, p. 6), that economists’ growing interest for narratives mirrors a progressive shift of economics to “*the more relational methodology of historical, social, and behavioral economics*”, which would encourage further interaction and integration with neighboring fields in the social sciences, humanities, linguistics and AI.

Here follows a critical analysis to this view, and an attempt to explain why economics “armed” itself with a new stream of research on economic narratives, called *narrative economics*. Rather than simply mirroring a rapprochement of economics to neighboring fields, the narrativization of economics and the emergence of *narrative economics* are above all the product of the growing influence of economic research on the political and economic system. This because, as we will see, academic economic research is endogenous to economic narratives and to the functioning of economic systems.
**On the non-separability between economics and economic narratives.** Economists' endogeneity in the systems they describe and model through their works (Herrmann-Pillath 2008; Andrikopoulos 2013) can be seen as case of omitted variables, possibly affecting the micro-dynamics of economic systems, the evolution of aggregate economic variables, as well as the design of economic institutions. For example, it has been observed that economists' recommendations and narratives in favor of austerity measures, before and during the European Sovereign Debt Crisis (2010-2012), have influenced its duration and outcomes (Crouch 2011). Not only economists can affect policy-making, like IMF's intervention timing and choices during the crisis, but also, they can play a key role in the formation of market operators' expectations, for example, by using or acknowledging those narratives that claimed that strengthened austerity measures were necessary, though not sufficient, to avoid the bankruptcy of those EU countries that had accumulated a high level of public debt, such as Italy and Greece. This point is particularly important because, although economics aspires to be a positive science, its works and narratives often end up producing normative effects, pushing the economic-world to fit to economic theories, rather than the other way round, like a foot forced to mold its shape to that of a rigid shoe, and the consequences of these narratives are not always insignificant or painless. Some economists, like Sedláček Tomáš (Sedláček 2014), have gone so far as to claim that neoclassical economics and its axiomatic approach, is a meta narrative told in a formal language:

> "[T]here is at least as much wisdom to be learned from our own philosophers, myths, religions, and poets as from exact and strict mathematical models of economic behaviour. I argue that economics should seek, discover, and talk about its own values, although we have been taught that economics is a value-free science. I argue that none of this is true and that there is more religion, myth, and archetype in economics than there is mathematics."

These meta narratives operate at a more abstract narrative level, transforming economists' world-views into model specification choices, and economists' preferences over world-views into assumptions, variables and case-study choices, exploiting as justifications for the latter the seeking of "clarity", "simplicity", "coherence", "elegance", "intutiveness" and/or "parsimony".

The increasing discoursivisation of economic events, phenomenon that accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis and more recently during the COVID-19 pandemic, signals a slow but relentless change in economic thinking, towards a more pragmatic and narrative-centric understanding of economic a airs and of their dynamics. In particular, the (re)birth of narrative economics coincides with the revival of a debate among economists about which are the boundaries of economics, and urged many researchers to consider whether these boundaries are destined to disappear or, on the contrary, whether they should be walled to prevent trespassing, in both directions, with bordering disciplines and research fields.
In the last years, the “narrativisation” of economics has found its advocates also in eco-
nomic departments, especially among behavioral and cognitivist economists, who crept
into the fissures and unexplored areas of the unfinished building of economics, to experi-
ment with new ways of understanding economic phenomena, by identifying (and eventu-
ally acknowledging) the role of narratives (Robert J Shiller [2020]; Robert J. Shiller [2017]).
In addition, the digital revolution and the incessant emergence of huge amounts of textual
data generated by (or in relation to) user behavior on online platforms, search engines
and social media (Costola, Iacopini, and Carlo R.M.A. Santagiustina 2021a; Iacopini and
Carlo R.M.A. Santagiustina 2021; Costola, Iacopini, and Carlo RMA Santagiustina 2021b;
Carlo R.M.A. Santagiustina 2018), has opened a debate (Meng 2021) about which types
of data should be considered by economists and other social scientists, when having to
model or explain a phenomenon of interest, like macro risks perception, investor uncer-
tainty or inequality aversion.

2.4 Conclusion

As illustrated through this work, in many cases, narratives have been found to be relevant factors capable of significantly affecting individuals’ choices and events’ outcomes, also in relation to market phenomena and economic issues. In specific situations, where economic outcomes and choices are poorly explainable or predictable if one considers only objective and non-narrative factors, like official economic statistics, discourse and narrative dynamics related to economic happenings often reveal to be valuable resources to understand and anticipate economic systems’ dynamics, especially at the aggregate level.

Narratives are not simply lagging or biased representations of the real-world and its
changes but also cognitive goods employed for sense- and decision-making purposes, as
such they are a key determinant of our socio-economic reality and its dynamics. Pop-
ular economic narratives, even when not grounded on evidence or sound deductive rea-
soning, should be carefully considered by policy makers, social science researchers and
economists, to understand to which degree observed economic events and revealed prefer-
ences are (or not) the by-product of the distribution of Collective Economic Narratives,
rather than the outcome of an optimization process based on exogenous preferences and
objective measures. This has relevant consequences both for economics and for economic
research. Moreover, the existence of a dependence relation between (cognitive) biases
revealed through narratives and biases in decision making, opens the way to innumerable
extremely promising research areas for economics and neighboring disciplines, in particu-
lar, that of the modeling and forecasting of behavioral biases through the analysis of the
dynamics of economic narratives, such as those related to social inequality and its causes.
Finally, narratives will probably play an increasingly relevant role in economic phenom-
ena, especially for what concerns immaterial and digital goods and their consumption,
therefore their analysis is of utmost importance for the understanding and modeling of
online economic phenomena and related investment and consumption behaviors at the
aggregate level.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the MUHAI family (https://muhai.org/people) for their precious feed-
back and inspiring discussions on narratives and related issues addressed in this work. I
am extremely grateful to Luc Steels for giving me the opportunity to contribute to this
foundational deliverable and for encouraging me to think critically and holistically about
the role of narratives and rhetorics in economics and economic a airs; reminding me not
to lose sight of a fundamental aspect of this ambitious project, its focus on the human be-
ings, and on their use of language for (re)constructing and understanding the ecosystems
in which they are embedded.
.
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<figure><img src="image_7.png" /></figure>

Current AI rests almost exclusively on statistically acquired pattern recognition and pattern completion. But there is now a consensus that human-centric AI, which requires better explanation, human influence, more robustness, and explicit ethical foundations, needs to go beyond pattern recognition to incorporate meaning and understanding.

Because meaning and understanding are rather vague and overloaded notions there is no obvious research path to achieve it. This volume explores how the notion of understanding is being discussed and treated in other human-centred research fields, more specifically in social brain science, social psychology, linguistics, semiotics, economics, social history and medicine, in order to gather ideas for building the next generation of human-centric AI and understand what technology gaps need to be plugged.

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /></figure>

This project has received funding from the European Pathfinder Project under Grant Agreement N° 951846