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I'm intrigued, here as elsewhere, by the issue of what comes next after acknowledgement of multiple stories.  What do we DO with them?  There must be more to open-ended transactional inquiry than just getting lots of stories out on the table, and being skeptical of all of them, including one's own.  Perhaps the use to be made of them is "a new understanding," both individual and collective?

Along these lines, two further thoughts.  Perhaps "the alternate stories we pose" aren't so much a way of "testing" either our own stories or those of other people but rather a way of eliciting stories from other people that might in turn alter our own?  And part of the the point of noticing differences between stories is to figure out what leads to those differences, what different observations there might be underlying the different stories?  Yes, there is no "real" size for a water molecule, but there are observations that underlie any given story about that size and having those observations might help us modify our existing stories, not only about molecules but about other things as well.

The other thought is the pros and cons of community and, more particularly, of some shared community stories.  Yes, everyone can have (or not have) and further evolve (or not evolve) their own story about the size of a water molecule, but if we work together on that we can increase the rate of development of both observations and stories, and so enhance our rate of change of stories both about water molecules and other things?  And to do that we need some shared stories, whether or not we take them as "real" and whether or not there are the same as our personal stories?