In this article, I defend the cognitive value of certain generic television series. Unlike media and television scholars, who have been appreciative of the informative capacity of television fiction, philosophers have been less willing to acknowledge the way in which these works contribute to our understanding of our social reality. My aim here is to provide one such account, grounded in aesthetic cognitivism, that is, the view that fiction is a source of knowledge. Focusing on crime and courtroom dramas, I (...) start by offering some examples of the cognitive benefits available in some of these series and I argue that the more beneficial cases establish superior mimetic relations with reality, enhancing their capacity to present ethically challenging issues. I then examine whether the fictional dimension of these works presents an obstacle to their informative potential and I conclude that it does not. A central aspect of my account is the claim that the degree of cognitive benefit depends on the underlying narrative strategy of the series. Specifically, there are clues in any given show, including the treatment of ongoing characters, which signal the extent to which it can be taken as mimetically reliable and thus, cognitively valuable. I complete my account by addressing anti-cognitivists’ arguments which call to doubt the informative aspect of television series and their capacity to address ethical concerns. (shrink)

According to widely accepted views in metasemantics, the outputs of chatbots and other artificial text generators should be meaningless. They aren’t produced with communicative intentions and the systems producing them are not following linguistic conventions. Nevertheless, chatbots have assumed roles in customer service and healthcare, they are spreading information and disinformation and, in some cases, it may be more rational to trust the outputs of bots than those of our fellow human beings. To account for the epistemic role of chatbots (...) in our society, we need to reconcile these observations. This paper argues that our engagement with chatbots should be understood as a form of prop-oriented make-believe; the outputs of chatbots are literally meaningless but fictionally meaningful. With the make-believe approach, we can understand how chatbots can provide us with knowledge of the world through quasi-testimony while preserving our metasemantic theories. This account also helps to connect the study of chatbots with the epistemology of scientific instruments. (shrink)

This paper substantiates a distinction, built out of Gricean resources, between two kinds of communicative act: showing and telling. Where telling that p proceeds by recruiting an addressee’s capacity to recognize trustworthy informants, showing does not. Instead, showing proceeds by presenting an addressee with a consideration that provides reason to believe that p (other than the reason provided by an informant’s credibility), and so recruits their capacity to respond to those reasons. With this account in place, the paper defends an (...) account of one way in which authors can show their readers that certain moral states of affairs obtain both inside, and outside of, their fictions. It is argued, moreover, that this kind of showing gives addressees access to more than just reasons for moral belief–it also gives them access to the sorts of reasons that enable agents to increase their moral understanding. In virtue of these latter capacities, the showing identified is a way of communicating about morality that is markedly different from the sort of moral testimony that many philosophers have been increasingly interested in of late. (shrink)