Just read Yann Martel’s “The Story of Pi” in one sitting on one day. The essence is about how “good” a story needs to be to be considered true or, expressed in reverse, there is no truth, only a good story. A recommended read whatever – an unputdownably good story as you “suspend disbelief”.
I had a comment from LanguageHat the other day, in response to my Aryans / Barfield post, (the comment was against the preceeding post in error) and by a strange coincidence I had already blogged a link to languagehat earlier. I picked-up today on a post from that blog about the etymology of the word Caviar. Anyway the gist is LanguageHat’s disapproval of someone who saw a good story as the more convincing etymology for the word. The irony for me is that the more convincing “version” of the truth does in fact turn out to be the better story too. Again, the OED disappoints, despite being essentially correct, whereas the AHD tells the same story so much more convincingly. The original erroneous (but good) story was just badly motivated – a greek bearing gifts.
I think I may have said before that “intent” is a key dimension of any good knowledge model.