Our factual worlds are more like cabinetry carefully carpentered than like a virgin forest inadvertently stumbled upon

--- Jerome Bruner, in What Is a Narrative Fact? The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 560:17-27, p. 18, 1998, via Robert Shiller in Narrative Economics, NBER Working Paper 23075

Context

I do not believe that facts ever quite stare anybody in the face. From a psychologist’s point of view, that is not how facts behave, as we well know from our studies of perception, memory, and thinking. Our factual worlds are more like cabinetry carefully carpentered than like a virgin forest inadvertently stumbled upon.