What is a Myth?

Myth can be defined a few different ways, or rather, we use one word to mean a few totally different (but somewhat related things).

Namely, broadly speaking, we use myth as a synonym for “something false” and as a shorthand way of saying “mythology”.

Our site is first and foremost about the “something false” kind, as we are generally digging for truths and not “fiction”.

Of course, one should note, mythology is rather useful in understanding truths, so the lines can blur in odd ways.

All that aside, for our purposes:

Myths are commonly held beliefs or ideas that are false. For a claim to be considered a myth one or more parts of it must be proved false.

In the broadest sense myths include any information held by someone or conveyed between people that includes any falsity. Myths also include folk tales which are used to explain phenomenon that were meant as allegory, although for the purposes of our site we use the word myth in the broader sense meaning that a statement is in anyway false.

Often myths contain some truth. On our site you may notice that a factoid (a commonly held belief) will be labeled myth despite it containing some amount of truth. The true aspects of any myth will be discussed on the page dedicated to the myth itself, those aspects may even have their own facts page.

On FactMyth.com we seek to separate truth from fiction, we accomplish this by labeling any statement that is untrue in any way as a myth. See Stanford Encyclopedia for a breakdown of “Truth”.

PHILOSOPHY – Epistemology: Introduction to Theory of Knowledge [HD]. Epistemology, the philosophy of disseminating fact and fiction. Where the “myths” we focus on reside.

What Is Myth? Crash Course Mythology #1. Mythology, the art of allegorical story telling (with its own sets of definitions). We are more focused on the epistemological kind of myths.

Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey Featuring Carl Jung. The two types tie together when discussing archetypes and tales of mythology and seeing them as metaphors for the human condition. In this way myth (mythology) can be useful for understanding deep truths, it isn’t exactly “a fact”, but “fiction” isn’t the right word either. Still, brain games aside, our website is about useful truths, so when we discuss Campbell and Jung we will stick to the facts.