Your question is hard to answer without a philosophical framework. I propose critical realism.

Critical realism assumes external reality exists, but it is always filtered through lenses. How does this help you understand whether myths convey truth?

There is no "view from nowhere". All knowledge is filtered through lenses.

Even our most rigorous scientific theories are perspectives and lenses, not reality itself.

Take Newton as an example. His laws helped predict planetary motion with precision for more than 200 years. However, Newton became a "special case" of a broader theory when Einstein proposed relativity. Neither Newton nor Einstein is wrong. Each lens is valid for its own domain and its own purposes.

More broadly, reality is like a mountain that we look at from different vantage points and with different perspectives. Each viewpoint reveals real features, but none captures the whole. We need multiple perspectives to understand complex phenomena. This is Mary Midgley's epistemology.

That metaphor is similar to Donna Haraway's idea of positioned knowledge. She claims that all observers are situated in a specific place, and therefore nobody can play the god trick by claiming that they can see it all.

This does NOT mean that "anything goes"; positions can be more or less adequate for specific purposes. Knowledge is both real and partial. So how can we distinguish science from myths?

Causality is layered. Physical causality ≠ psychological causality, but both are real

Different phenomena require different causal explanations. Myths crudely model psychological or social causality, while physics models material causality.

Take as an example Icarus' myth. That myth has a physical layer (wax melts at a specific temperature, wings fail if they deform, and bodies fall if nothing counteracts gravity). However, it also has a psychological layer (humans can be full of hubris, hubris can make people ignore warnings, ignoring warnings can lead to reckless action). You cannot explain Icarus' fall using only physics or psychology. Both are necessary and both are real.

Take another example: market behavior. In classical economics, investors invest because they expect to make a profit. Investments can reduce production costs and can temporarily increase demand of many goods associated with production. However, demand has limits, and so investors stop making money and their expectations shift. This leads to a decrease in investment. The entire loop shows how psychological states (expectations) affect material reality and vice-versa.

So myths can model real causal processes, especially in psychological and social domains (and usually not in physical ones). However, not all myths can model real causal processes. How do we know which myths work or are true?

Validity is contextual. A story's "truth" depends on its function

Models (scientific or mythic) are considered "true enough" by a group of people when they serve their purpose. In other words, validity requires people to consider a story as fit for purpose, not that it corresponds perfectly with reality.

Take physics' frictionless surfaces. Their function is to simplify calculations and to isolate key variables. However, the literal truth is that there are no frictionless surfaces. In this context, validity enables accurate predictions where friction is negligible. Most communities that use Newtonian physics would consider it unreasonable to dismiss frictionless surfaces in general because they don't correspond perfectly with reality. However, that same community could consider it reasonable for someone to ask whether a frictionless surface is valid in a specific case and for a specific purpose.

Another example is therapeutic narratives. In many schools of psychology, patients can reconstruct personal stories to reduce suffering and increase psychological flexibility. The point is not for the therapeutic narratives to precisely match historical facts. The point is to achieve therapeutic efficacy. In this case, the truth is pragmatic in the following way: does it help the patient live a better life?

More broadly, any story (be it a Scientific Theory That Has a Proper Name, a Greek myth, or a mundane explanation)—any story can be evaluated with the following questions: what function does the story fulfill? Taking into account the story's context and function, are there serious validity threats or serious alternative explanations?

So what does all of this mean for your original question? Can myths convey truths even if they are not literally true? Yes, but only when we understand that all knowledge is filtered (including science), that myths model different causal layers, and that validity is contextual.

In this view, myths and science aren't fundamentally different kinds of knowledge; both are knowledge claims

• appropriate to different causal layers
• evaluated for validity by different communities
• and evaluated for validity for different purposes.

Bibliography

• Bhaskar, Roy. A Realist Theory of Science. Routledge, 2013. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203090732. (Foundational text on critical realism)
• Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. (To understand situated knowledges)
• Hayes, Steven C. The Act in Context: The Canonical Papers of Steven C. Hayes. Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. (Useful to understand pragmatics)
• Maxwell, Joseph A. Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach. Sage publications, 2012. (To understand validity, paradigms, theories, variance theory, and process theory)
• McKee, Robert. Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting. Harper Collins, 1997. (To understand how stories express essentialized causality)
• Midgley, Mary. The Ethical Primate: Humans, Freedom, and Morality. 1996th ed. Routledge, 1994. (To learn about the mountain metaphor and tools to avoid reductionism)

This comes up a bit in discussion around Fictionalism in the philosophy of Mathematics, in works by Harty Field and others. We have this idea that mathematical objects don't really exist, and all of our arguments tell in favour of the idea that our best parsimonious theory of the stuff of reality doesn't include platonically ideal things like numbers or sets. A more appealing theory is to say that we're telling a story with the numbers, sets, topological spaces etc. as characters, and the theorems that we come back with from the proofs that we write in that story tell us useful and relevant things about the world that we do actually interact with, even where that world itself does not contain those things as proper objects.

Fictionalism in Mathematics is often thought of as a sort of "of the gaps" theory, in the sense that the strongest argument for it is the systematic disassembly of its competitor theories of platonism, logicism, formalism, constructivism, structualism etc. But Stephen Yablo has written a few pieces taking this aspect of Fictionalism seriously, asking "in what sense can theorems be informative if their content is literally false?".

In "The Myth of the Seven", Yablo presents a suggestion that I find compelling: that the capacity for information comes from treating mathematically abstract discourse as a representational aid. We use numbers because as a way to formulate and understand some ideas about the world they give us a framework within which to work, extrapolate, study and play. These are the pieces we use in the game of modelling, and that have roles and positions in our developing understanding how our models work and hence also the worlds that we take those models to be representations of.

The maths does have rules and relations of its own, but their applicability outwith their own game comes in our treating them "as-if" these are things in the world. The metaphor, as we might say, is "apt", rather than "true". This relationship is one of intention, its accuracy is about our imaginative ability to model the things we see in the models that we construct, and in as much as our model is a good picture, the consequences we draw from manipulating and exploring our model can reveal novel inspirations for things to find in the world that are so modelled.

Now, what's interesting here is that this doesn't necessarily rule out the idea that there may be true things to say about our models as well. In the sense of our wider fictions, it is true to say that the characters of Elizabeth Bennett and Fitzwilliam Darcy are characters in Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice", even where we say it is only fictional that Darcy lives in Pemberley. But in as much as we read Pride and Prejudice as a narrative talking about qualities of the human condition, we may ask about Jane Austen's relationship to the society of her time, about her descriptions of the characters in her stories as authentically representing people of the world she inhabited, and in their psychologies as of the sort that real people might have shared in that world. The "deeper truth" of the novel corresponds to the accuracy of the intentional representation that Austen has constructed for us.

(This sense in which there are some true things to say about mathematics itself is why I lean towards Formalism rather than Fictionalism, but the discussion is useful in any case)

For Yablo, the concept of aptness is quite closely connected to the capacity of a model or story to communicate things that are true. It does however go a bit further beyond this, because we aren't just interested in confirming things that we already know to be true - there is something interesting in the role that it serves to identify a capacity to explore further into things that we do not presently know. Yablo talks about this as "Cognitive Promise" - that the capacity for exploration in how we represent things will inspire and allow for new avenues for discovery. We might not know for sure that the Axiom of Choice is in fact true, but considering it as an axiom gives rise to a very rich scope of possible derivations and suggestions for where to look next, and this is partly why ZFC is such an apt story to tell about the mathematical structure of reality.

So perhaps this goes some of the way towards answering this quality that you're looking for in mythology - the stories that we're looking to tell are in some important sense productive sources of statements about the human experience, that they are apt ones to tell because of their exploration of complex ideas beyond our normal capacity to do so in mundane, factive talk, and that the conclusions they draw are in some important sense accurate and helpful depictions of life as we live it. They are but intentional representations, but they do a good job of representing, even in appeal to things that are not literally true.

Humans are moved by words - also by myths and fictional stories. The stories have an emotional effect on us and this can lead to action and to changes in behavior. For instance, the story of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) became the most best-selling book in the US (next to the bible). It reframed the political issue of slavery in personal terms and helped the abolitionist movement.

The question whether or not myths or purely fictional stories "convey" a "non-literal" truth can only be answered if you consider which effects those stories have on readers or listeners, and why they have the effects they have. The general answer to the why question is: They can make us see the world in a different light. That is, open our eyes for things we didn't see earlier, perhaps because we are presented with analogies that we had not seen before. As Franz Kafka wrote:

Ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns.
(A book should be the axe for the frozen lake inside us.)

If you start from an assumption that the stories either represent a reality or do not do so, then, of course, they are "merely" fictions.

You ask:

Can myths convey truths even if they are not literally true?

Of course. A myth is a template for conveying facts even if fictional. Parables are a related example of how lessons can be taught through fiction. Consider the parable of the Scorpion and the Frog. Setting aside the absurdity of a frog conversing with a scorpion, it conveys an important lesson that even someone with good intentions can often do harm when their nature is to behave in a particular fashion. Aesop's Stag and the Antlers is a commentary on vanity. Daedalus and Icarus is a commentary on the brashness of youth. In all three cases, principles that might be considered wisdom are established through the use of fiction. This is because there are many types of truth. The literal facts corresponding to the state of affairs in the world are called correspondent truths, but truth is a complex topic, with the notion of personal truth denoting a personally meaningful idea. Often, myths embody proverbial phrases which can be understood as principles or heuristics for thinking and behaving.

I just finished reading a book on mythology. Myths have given rise to an extremely diverse number of explanations regarding what they are and what their nature is, and these explanations are often very polarizing. Interpretations range from myths expressing deep metaphysical truths to failed attempts at science.

There is certainly a universal aspect to myths because some themes recur in many cultures, which analytic philosophy cannot ever explain. Jung and Freud developed influential theories about what myths are.

Schelling and Nietzsche provided purely philosophical interpretations of Greek mythology.

There is no single answer to your question, but if you look into the authors I mentioned, you will surely gain a deeper understanding of mythology.

Interesting fact: George Lucas intended his 'Star Wars' movie series to be pure mythology. He was very influenced by Joseph Campbell's 'Hero with a thousand faces', this book is a masterpiece. Luke Skywalker is a mythical hero par excellence.

Can myths convey or express truths in some sense and to some degree? Sure.

One might say that Hansel and Gretel conveys a truth that people can be dangerous, especially for naïve or innocent people (like children), who may too trusting of such people, thereby making themselves vulnerable. Maybe it also conveys that there are some amount of opportunities to stop such people, to get out of dangerous circumstances. It could also be said to convey falsehoods, e.g. that witches are real.

The danger is when someone asserts that some truths are being conveyed by a myth, when those are actually false and/or immoral dogmas. Or they might just vaguely assert that something (e.g. a religion) is metaphorically true, in order to support such dogmas which exist within that. The literary beauty or the appeal of the myth may obscure the fact that the supposed truths aren't true, or it may blur the line between true and false.

How can you actually tell the difference?

• What exactly is the truth being conveyed?

  Some people rely on vague handwaving to make their poorly justified points. If someone is unwilling or unable to get down to specifics (especially if they respond with more vague handwaving or word salad), one should be skeptical that they have a well-justified claim.

• What independent justification do we have for considering that to be true?

  Myths can be useful to convey truths, but you shouldn't need a myth to convey a truth. If someone can't justify a claim without a myth, that's probably a huge red flag. If we have independent evidence against that claim, that should take precedence above the myth.

No text ‒ spoken or written ‒ is reality

Not only are myths not reality ‒ no text is reality.

"La Trahison des Images" ("The Treachery of Images") (1928-9) by René Magritte. Original owned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

"This is not a pipe" says the text.

Do you agree or disagree?

To all that disagree, and say "Of course that is a pipe!" Magritte said: "Okay then, stuff it, light it and smoke it".

On the surface, this is just trolling, Magritte is having a laugh at our conventions and shortcuts when speaking.

...but when going deeper and exposing these conventions ‒ conventions such as saying "This is a pipe" when what we mean is "This is a picture of a what a pipe can look like, it is not the real thing" ‒ Magritte reminds us that pictures are not the real thing.

And expanding from this, recordings not the events they recorded, neither sound nor video.

Texts are not the real thing they describe.

So, I am going to cut the Gordian knot that is your question by saying: no text is reality. All texts ‒ no matter if they are myths or carefully researched and sourced encyclopedia entries ‒ are equally intangible.

The connection between text and reality, happens in our minds, not on the page/screen.

Now then, can a text that does not describe anything real still make us infer things?

Well, yes, and the image of the pipe shows this. "This is not a pipe" the text says, and from this, we still infer truth about representation, perception, and meaning.

We can never know whether Magritte's image describes a real pipe or one the artist sketched up from their general notion about pipes.

The pipe itself could be mythical.

And we do not care, because replicating reality is not the point. It is getting the message across that matters.

So, can myth convey information, even truths?

Yes, myths can ‒ undoubtedly ‒ convey understanding, information, even truths, either through increasing understanding about a subject, or in the meta analysis, when diving into why the myth exists, what is tells us about the culture that has created and propagated it.

You could even say that all text is myth by default. Knowledge is simply myth that survived contact with evidence.

1.Abstracting completely Adorno’s word

"There is no right life in the wrong one." (Minima Moralia, sect. 18)

from its context, I vote for not embedding truth in false narratives.

2.Works of fiction may describe all sorts of misleading concepts and erroneous conclusions. But as long as they are marked as fiction, the reader is alarmed to check and make his own decision.

3.Myths may generalize general human experience. But also, myths can and actually have been invented and used to guide persons along the lines of certain ideologies.

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the Neil Gaiman quote:

"Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."

Sometimes a myth carries more information about what people think. This is a passage from an article in the New Yorker about Goethe:

"One famous anecdote concerns Goethe and Beethoven, who were together at a spa resort when they unexpectedly met a party of German royalty on the street. Goethe deferentially stood aside and removed his hat, while Beethoven kept his hat firmly on his head and plowed through the royal group, forcing them to make way—which they did, while offering the composer friendly greetings. Here was a contrast of temperaments, but also of generations. Goethe belonged to the courtly past, when artists were the clients of princes, while Beethoven represented the Romantic future, when princes would clamor to associate with artists. Historians dispute whether the incident actually took place, but if it didn’t the story is arguably even more revealing; the event became famous because it symbolized the way people thought about Goethe and his values."

The Greek Miracle - segueing from mythos to logos - occurred 2.5k years ago. Myths simply failed to "deliver the goods".

In C. S. Lewis's book An Experiment in Criticism, he wrote:

BEGIN QUOTE

A myth means, in this book, a story which has the following characteristics.

1. It is, in the sense I have already indicated, extra-literary. Those who have got at the same myth through Natalis Comes, Lemprière, Kingsley, Hawthorne, Robert Graves, or Roger Green, have a mythical experience in common; and it is important, not merly an H.C.F. In contrast to this, those who have got the same story from Brook's Romeus and Shakespeare's Romeo have a mere H.C.F., in itself valueless.

2. The pleasure of myth depends hardly at all on such usual narrative attractions as suspense or surprise. Even at a first hearing it is felt to be inevitable. And the first hearing is chiefly valuable in introducing us to a permanent object of contemplation---more like a thing than a narration---which works upon us by its peculiar flavours or quality, rather as a smell or a chord does. Sometimes, even from the first, there is hardly any narrative element. The idea that the gods, and all good men, live uner the shadow of Ragnarok is hardly a story. The Hesperides, with their apple-tree and dragon, are already a potent myth, without bringing in Herakles to steal the apples.

3. Human sympathy is at a minimum. We do not project ourselves at all strongly into the characters. They are like shapes moving in another world. We feel indeed that the pattern of their movements has a profound relevance to our own life, but we do not imaginitively transport ourselves into theirs. The story of Orpheus makes us sad; but we are sorry for all men rather than vividly sympathetic with him, as we are, say, with Chaucer's Troilus.

4. Myth is always, in one sense of that word, `fantastic'. It deals with impossibles and preternaturals.

5. The experience may be sad or joyful but it is always grave. Comic myth (in my sense of myth) is impossible.

6. The experience is not only grave, by awe-inspiring. We feel it to be numinous. It is as if something of great moment had been communicated to us. The recurrent efforts of the mind to grasp---we mean, chiefly, to conceptualise---this something, are seen in the persistent tendency of humanity to provide myths with allegorical explanations. And after all allegories have been tried, the myth itself continues to feel more important than they.

END QUOTE

In particular, this says "It is as if something of great moment had been communicated to us." Does that mean it must be true? My hunch is that a myth, as described here, tries to communicate something that simply exceeds the ability of human language as we know it to express literally.

Richard Dawkins's book Unweaving the Rainbow tells us:

BEGIN QUOTE

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

END QUOTE

Construed literally, "most people" are most people who actually exist, so this is false, but I think it's a "myth" by Lewis's definition. And it clearly is trying to tell us something that Dawkins believes to be true even if he knows that in its fully literal sense, it is not.

Whatever assertions are conveyed by or perceived in a work (whether ostensibly fictional or non-fictional) can be assessed for their truth, under whatever theory of truth one ascribes to.