Abstract
Philosophical theories of fiction pivot on relational considerations. Semantic theorists are interested in semantic relations. Do we refer to fictional beings and events? Do fictional sentences relate to things in ways that assign them truth values? Do fictional sentences stand in inferential relations? Do we ourselves bear relations to these sentences in ways that qualify as knowledge and belief? Philosophers of art also have a stake in the relational. What is the relation between a painting and what it represents? What is its relation, if any, to the intentions of the artist? In what affective, and other psychological relations do we stand, not only to the fictional, but also to the dead of Guernica and Nicholai Ge’s Crucifixion. Philosophers of language tend to privilege semantic relations and deal with psychological ones in a more derivative way if at all, whereas many aestheticians tend to emphasize the affective over the semantic. The distinction between semantic and affective relations has been intendedly smudged since the opening pages of this book. Its procedural rules subject its semantic and alethic assertions to close reckonings with lived readerly and writerly experience, and with fiction’s powers of engagement. The book’s attachment to the causal response model of knowledge deepens its tie to the psychological. Its insistence that a logic won’t work for fiction except in collaboration with cognitive psychology, carried with it no presumption of a metaphysically sharp divide between the cognitive and the affective.
It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.
Holmes, in The Adventure of the Copper Beeches (1892)
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Notes
- 1.
As well, of course, to the many dead of Guernica and the three of the crucifixion.
- 2.
See again Sainsbury’s Reference without Referents. Mind you, as we saw, Walton does this too. Mimesis offers a general theory of artistic representation. Fiction is dealt with en passant.
- 3.
John Dewey’s Art as Experience is important, published in 1934 but dated in 1935 in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, volume 10, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989. Dewey was also a logician but not a mathematical one. Nelson Goodman, also a logician of first-order nominalist disposition, is best known for his Fact, Fiction and Forecast, 4th revised edition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press, 1983; first published in 1954. Also important is his Languages of Art, 2nd edition, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976. More recent contributions of note are Dominic McIver Lopes, Sight and Sensibility: Evaluating Pictures, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, Tamar Szabó, “On the relation between pretense and belief”, in Matthew Kieran and Dominic McIver Lopes, editors, Imagination: Philosophy and the Arts, London: Routledge, 2003, and Bence Nanay, Aesthetics as Perception, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Although not focused on art, Adam Morton’s, Emotion and Imagination, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013 is valuable reading. Also of interest are Stacie Friend, “Getting carried away”, Midwestern Studies in Philosophy: Film and the Emotions, 34 (2010), 77–105, and Timothy Schroeder and Carl Matheson, “Imagination and emotion”, in Shaun Nichols, editor, The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays in Pretence, Possibility and Fiction, pages 19–39, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. See as well Amy Coplan, “Empathetic engagement with narrative fiction”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Mette Hjort and Sue Laver, editors, Emotion and the Arts, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, Aaron Meskin, Jonathan Weinberg, “Emotions, fiction, and cognitive architecture”, British Journal of Aesthetics, 43 (2003), 18–34, and R. J. Yanal, Paradoxes of Emotion and Fiction, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.
- 4.
Along with dread and exultation. Some effective states require, or at least submit to, cathartic remediation in the manner of Aristotle’s Poetics. See again Kendall Walton, “On fearing fictions”.
- 5.
We also did the same, without announcing it, for his so-called extranuclear properties such as existence, actuality and reality, without in so doing, making the same provisions for his everyday properties. When Sherlock exists in the story, he has the apparently contrary property of not existing in reality. But when Sherlock is six feet tall in the story, there is no contrary height that he has in reality.
- 6.
Except by dialethic logicians.
- 7.
See here Bence Nanay, “Is twofoldness necessary for representational seeing?”, British Journal of Aesthetics, 45 (2005), 263–272.
- 8.
Walton, Mimesis, Yanal, Paradoxes of Emotion and Fiction, and Simo Saatela, “Fiction, make-believe and quasi-emotions”, British Journal of Aesthetics, 34 (1994), 25–34. But see Tamar Szabó Gendler, “Genuine rational fictional emotion”, in Matthew Kieran, editor, Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.
- 9.
It is possible, I suppose, that quasi-theorists are confusing “quasi” with “qua”. “Nancy died” is true qua fictional, while false qua literal. “Quasi” won’t reproduce this. “Quasi” and “qua” have separate Latin roots.
- 10.
“Truth in fiction” p. 270.
- 11.
C. A. J. Coady, Testimony: A Philosophical Inquiry, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Robert Audi, “The a priori authority of testimony”, Philosophical Issues, 14 (2004), 18–34. Jonathan Adler, Belief’s Own Ethics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Jennifer Lackey, Learning From Words: Testimony as a Source of Knowledge, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Woods, Errors of Reasoning, Chap. 9.
- 12.
As surmised by the publisher’s referee.
- 13.
See, for example, Colin Radford, “How can we be moved by the fate of Ana Karenina?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 49 (1975), 67–80.
- 14.
Walton, “Fearing fictions”.
- 15.
Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror: or Paradoxes of the Heart, New York: Routledge, 1990.
- 16.
For discussion see Currie, The Nature of Fiction, and Meskin and Weinberg, “Emotions, fictions, and cognitive architecture”.
- 17.
Jillian A. Isenberg, Fiction without Pretense, doctoral dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2013, doc https://doi.org/10.14288/1.0074168.
- 18.
Walton calls this “psychological participation”.
- 19.
Some of the earlier psychological literature of note includes: Shelly Chaiken, The Psychology of Attitudes, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993. Richard J. Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. D. A. Prentice and R. J. Gerrig, “Exploring the boundary between fiction and reality”, in S. Chaiken and Y. Trope, editors, Dual-Process Theories in Social Psychology, pages 529–546, New York: Guilford, 1999. Keith Oatley, “Why fiction may be twice as true as fact: Fiction as cognitive and emotional simulation”, Review of General Psychology, 3 (1999), 101–117. Melanie Greene, Jennifer Garst, Timothy C. Brock and L. J. Shrum, “The power of fiction: Determinants and boundaries?” in Karen E. Dill, editor, Blurring the Lines Between Entertainment and Persuasion, pages 161–176, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2004.
- 20.
Prentice and Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds. See also Peter Ludlow, “From Sherlock to Buffy to Klingon and Norrathian platinum pieces: Pretense, contextualism, and the myth of fiction”, Philosophical Issues, 16 (2006), 162–183.
- 21.
Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds, pp. 216–217.
- 22.
D. T. Gibert, D. S. Krull and P. S. Malone, “Unbelieving the unbelievable: Some problems in the rejection of false information”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59 (1990), 601–613, and D. T. Gibert, T. Tafarodi, and P. S. Malone, “You can’t not believe everything you read”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65 (1993) 221–233.
- 23.
Fiction and Narrative, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
- 24.
D. A. Prentice, R. D. Gerrig and D. S. Bailis, “What readers bring to the processing of fictional texts”, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 5 (1997), 416–420.
- 25.
S. C. Wheeler, M. C. Green and T. C. Brock, “Fictional narratives change beliefs: Replications of Prentice, Gerrig and Bailis (1997) with mixed collaboration”, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 6 (1999), 136–141.
- 26.
This rings Anselmian bells. Anselm famously declared “credo ut intelligam” – “I believe in order that I may understand”. Anselmian knowledge is favourably considered in Chap. 9 of Errors of Reasoning.
- 27.
Save for the comparative few who write for the general reader.
- 28.
As it also breaches the law’s understated and empirically false doxastic formulation.
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Woods, J. (2018). Salty Tears and Racing Hearts. In: Truth in Fiction. Synthese Library, vol 391. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72658-8_7
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