The Age of Reason marks the official triumph of reason over superstition, but the victory was not complete. Today, the immense success of the Western style of thinking has converted every other civilization. The ancient and highly-developed Chinese style of thinking has been forced to take a back seat to Western science and engineering. But success does not imply perfection. All we have done is to extend the syllogism to staggering lengths.
Modern knowledge is a collection of chains of deductions, each thousands of links long.
Social interaction is surely the most prominent of these. The application of sequential reasoning to the understanding of social behavior has made a few interesting inroads, but the relative lack of success in these areas serves to underline the inappropriateness of using sequential reasoning to problems that are intrinsically pattern-like in nature. Sociologists deserve genuine respect for what they have achieved with such a blunt tool, but the storytellers are way ahead of the sociologists in exploring human interaction. This is not because storytellers are smarter than sociologists, but because they have a more powerful intellectual tool to work with. But that tool has not had the same amount of effort lavished on it that our sequential reasoning tool has enjoyed.