Fiction

It is well known that, from the second year of life, children engage in imaginative activities and pretend play. Pretending is changing the nature of perceptual inputs at will. In this paper I shall take up the question of young children’s knowledge about the pretend-real distinctions. According to Josef Perner, they have an immature concept, called prelief, because they do not differentiate between believing and pretending. But, we know that belief and pretense have different inputs. Imagination is at the whim (...) of our intentions, belief not. And, on the side of outputs, when children pretend, they carry out behavioral sequences “as if” they really had beliefs, but belief and pretense have different causal roles in action tendencies. So, when a boy pretends, he acts out his pretense within the scope of a supposition, but, why doesn’t he go all the way? That is, how are we to explain the limits children place on their activity? I shall answer these questions arguing that pretense is tied to conceptual knowledge. This will enable me to give a metaphysical account of this phenomenon, because it is based on the intentional manipulation of the identity of things and their properties. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the general problem of how to give a philosophical account of the nature of representation by looking at three specific philosophies of language and the philosophic treatment of fictional discourse. I argue that Edmund Husserl, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and J. L. Austin all try to give accounts of meaning by arguing for what I call a "closure of meaning" in language. The closure thesis is the claim that some set of criteria can exhaustively determine the ways in which (...) language can be meaningful. This thesis is implicit in Husserl's theory of expressive meaning in the Logical Investigations, in Wittgenstein's picture theory, and in J. L. Austin's pragmatic account of meaning in speech act theory. My general thesis is that the three philosophers in question do not successfully defend the closure thesis for linguistic representation. Since fictional discourse is a source of counterexamples to the closure thesis, I look specifically at two recent philosophical accounts of fiction by David Lewis and John Searle. I criticize these attempts to account for fictional discourse within referential and pragmatic theories of language. Since such attempts are usually part of a closure thesis, my discussion of fiction provides further reasons for doubting the general possibility of accounting for a closure of meaning in language. (shrink)

This study outlines a new theory of time in first-person narrative fiction based on the concept "mediacy." By applying a phenomenological understanding of time to narrators of first-person fiction, the study draws a distinction between narration and narratization. Narration refers to the narrative act, the act of telling. This study contends that although a literary narrative may serve as record of past events, it is primarily a notation of the narrative act. The narrative act is a unified experience that exhibits (...) a structure of beginning, middle, and end, which is notated in a literary text. A narratization, in contrast, refers to the extended temporal field in which the narrator orients himself/herself. Unlike narration, which is recorded in a literary text, narratization usually is only implied by the narration. During a narrative act, which is a basic action, the narrator orients himself/herself on the basis of some envisioned future that s/he hopes to achieve, partly through the act of telling. On the basis of that envisioned future, the narrator determines the actions s/he needs to take to achieve that future. The narrative act, then, is constructed in part on the basis of the futural dimension of the expansive temporal field, which is configured by the narrator in the act of telling. This study differs from traditional analyses of time in narrative in that it recognizes a futural orientation on the part of the narrator, or mediator, who is engaged in a narrative act, in addition to his/her orientations toward the past and the present. This study recognizes that the narrative act, of which literary narrative is a record, is a dialectic between past and future. The implications of this theory of time in narrative are explored in analyses of short stories by Cynthia Rich, Lee Smith, and Raymond Carver. (shrink)

Kania[1] has recently developed an argument which poses a serious challenge to the “ubiquity thesis†– the view that every literary narrative[2] necessarily has a fictional narrator.[3] Kania characterizes a fictional narrator as a (possibly non-human) agent who tells (or is responsible for) the narrative and who exists on “the same..

Kania[1] has recently developed an argument which poses a serious challenge to the “ubiquity thesis†– the view that every literary narrative[2] necessarily has a fictional narrator.[3] Kania characterizes a fictional narrator as a (possibly non-human) agent who tells (or is responsible for) the narrative and who exists on “the same..

What mysteries lie at the heart of fiction's power to enchant and engage the mind? Empty Revelations considers a number of philosophical problems that fiction raises, including the primary issue of how we can think and talk about things that do not exist. Peter Alward covers thought-provoking terrain, exploring fictional truth, the experience of being "caught up" in a story, and the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. At the centre of Alward's argument is a figure known as the "narrative informant" (...) who mediates the reader's encounter with fictional events through - sometimes unreliable - reporting. Developing a theory in which the author is a sculptor who constructs works of fiction out of words, Alward demonstrates that much of the confusion about fiction stems from a failure to properly distinguish between writing fiction and telling stories. Combining clarity, philosophical sophistication, ingenuity, and originality, Empty Revelations is a rewarding read for both scholars of philosophy and anyone interested in the complex ways that fiction works. (shrink)

A common approach to drawing boundary between fiction and non-fiction is by appeal to the kinds of speech acts performed by authors of works of the respective categories. Searle, for example, takes fiction to be the product of illocutionary pretense of various kinds on the part of authors and non-fiction to be the product of genuine illocutionary action.1 Currie, in contrast, takes fiction to be the product of sui generis fictional illocutionary action on the part of authors and non-fiction to (...) be the product of assertion and other familiar kinds of illocutionary action.2 The central thesis of this paper is that the speech act approach to fictionality is simply a non-starter. Now it is, of course, commonplace to note that approaches of this kind run into difficulty accommodating nonliterary fictions3 and uncomposed or authorless fictions. What will be argued here, however, is that speech acts analyses are inadequate even understood narrowly as accounts of composed literary fiction. And the reason is that they fail to adequately attend to the distinction between composition and storytelling. (shrink)

I have been dissatisfied with Walton’s make-believe model of appreciator engagement with fiction ever since my first encounter with it as a graduate student.1 What I have always objected to is not the suggestion that such engagement is broadly speaking imaginative; rather, it is the suggestion that it specifically involves de se imaginative activity on the part of appreciators. That is, while I concede that appreciators imagine (de re) of the fictional works they experience that they are thus and so, (...) I deny that they imagine (de se) experiencing an object that is thus and so.2 The main source of my dissatisfaction with the make-believe model is that it is phenomenologically unfamiliar; I have never been aware of de se imaginings of the requisite sort while appreciatively engaged with fiction.3 Of course, one could argue that it nevertheless occurs, albeit sub-consciously. But in order for this manoeuvre to be plausible, it would have to be established that there are appreciative phenomena that can only (or best) be explained by the supposition that appreciators engage in de se imagining, and which cannot be adequately explained by the supposition that they merely engage in de re imagining. Currie, for example, has argued that we need to make the former supposition in order to find a solution to the “problem of personality,” the problem of explaining why our emotional reactions to the plights of fictional characters often differ from our reactions to the similar plights of actual people.4 What I want to argue in this paper is that Currie’s defense of de se imaginative engagement is.. (shrink)

Explanations of how we understand some types of utterances often involve appeals to either speaker meaning or context. I suggest that these devices are inadequate for explaining how we understand utterances using the word 'I', metaphorical statements, and statements in and about works of fiction. Instead, I argue that in order to explain our understanding of such utterances, we need to appeal to point of view. ;I deal with each type of utterance separately, in each case building on a philosopher's (...) previous work of explaining how we understand that type of utterance: Gareth Evans on utterances using the word 'I', Max Black's interaction theory of metaphor, and Kendall Walton's theory of make-believe for fictional statements. I note that in each case the relevant theory is not comprehensive enough. Gareth Evans accounts for how each of us thinks of ourselves as a self, but neglects to account for how each of us thinks of ourselves as an individual self. Max Black's theory accounts for most of our intuitions about metaphor, but his theory cannot explain our emotional response to metaphorical phrases. Kendall Walton's theory accounts for statements made in works of fiction and most statements made about works of fiction. However, his theory of make-believe is inadequate for explaining how we understand critical statements about works of fiction. I argue that all three theories can provide the required explanatory force if each is supplemented by an appeal to point of view. ;Before characterizing point of view, I show that context is inadequate for explaining metaphorical statements and statements in and about works of fiction. Any contextual theory for these statements would be inadequate unless it allowed for multiple contexts for a single sentence. I concentrate on Francois Recanati's multiple domain theory in order to show that theories positing such multiple contexts are inadequate because they lack ways of differentiating and accessing such contexts. ;Appealing to point of view, in conjunction with the three theories I favour, explains how we understand the utterances in question. Self-conscious self-reference using the word 'I' is possible because we assume an imaginative stance for viewing what we take to be our `inner life.' Metaphorical statements are understood through a pattern that includes the self. When making statements about fictional characters mentioned in works of fiction, we make-believe that the names refer to actual people. However, when we make critical statements using such names, we believe that they are the names of fictional characters. (shrink)

According to R. Stalnaker, context plays a role in determining the proposition expressed by a sentence by providing the domain of possible worlds that propositions distinguish between: a sentence expresses a proposition by selecting a subset of the set of possible situations given by the context. This is also true for embedded sentences, but these sentences express propositions by selecting subsets out of contexts derived from the basic one. In this paper we propose a semantic analysis of sentences of the (...) form “In fiction x, p” based on this picture of context. We argue that the derived contexts for sentences in the scope of “In fiction x” are determined by three factors: what the beliefs of the author are taken to be, the conventions established for the fiction, and a defeasible presumption of reliability of the narrator. We develop a formal implementation based on the notion of a system of spheres centered on a set of worlds. (shrink)

Over time, we in English departments have resigned ourselves to prophecies of doom. Our discipline is said to be in terminal decline, and civilization with it. Usually, it is our own fault: the value of our work, so the story has gone, is threatened from within, whether by submission to esoteric theories on the one hand, or by dissipation into the banalities of cultural studies on the other. Our only hope, they tell us, is the immediate restoration of the old (...) pieties, as these were cemented in the nineteenth century: literature teaches moral values; poets redeem from decay the divine element in mortal beings; a knowledge of the best that has been thought and said makes us more humane.Moral panics come and go .. (shrink)

Not so long ago the occasional story would be told in the news that someone with a fascination for all things medical had spent months or even years masquerading as a doctor in a large and anonymous hospital. No doubt the absence of such stories today is due to heightened security and vigilance, partly as a result of the realization among hospital staff that such individuals were indeed at large. No doubt too the number of such cases was due to (...) the opportunity afforded by the freedom of movement of professional staff and the size of the institution in question. For that reason, it is hard to imagine such opportunities existing elsewhere, then or now. Nonetheless, it may be heuristic to think of this situation .. (shrink)