From Saga to Simulation: Cognitive Constructivism in Culture, Literature and Media

Abstract

This paper argues that cultural artifacts function as distributed cognitive models through which societies construct, stabilize, and revise shared interpretations of reality. Drawing on cognitive constructivism, enactivism, predictive processing, and extended and distributed cognition, it treats narratives not as ornamental representations but as components of a supra-personal modeling architecture. The account is explicitly realist: cognitive and cultural models are constructed, but they remain answerable to a mind-independent world through environmental constraint, corrective feedback, and practical failure. The paper distinguishes subpersonal predictive modeling, personal narrative modeling, and supra-personal cultural modeling, then traces a historical sequence of narrative media as increasingly complex simulation environments. Epic encodes cosmological and moral constraints; theater adds embodied and dialogical co-presence; the novel intensifies interior psychological simulation; print culture stabilizes symbolic models across generations; cinema orchestrates audiovisual attention; and interactive media add agency within rule-governed worlds. These developments increase the dimensionality of shared simulation without implying that later media simply supersede earlier ones. The paper further proposes a constraint-driven account of narrative persistence and identifies failure modes in collective modeling, including overfitting, self-sealing belief systems, and salience distortion. The resulting framework presents culture as an adaptive but corrigible epistemic infrastructure through which human communities make a resistant world intelligible and actionable.