Abstract
Gendler reformulated the so-called imaginability (or imaginative) puzzle in terms of authorial breakdown. The main idea behind this move was to isolate the essential features displayed by the alleged problematic cases and to specify a puzzle general enough to be applied to a variety of different types of imaginative resistance. I offer various criticisms of Gendler’s approach to imaginative resistance that also raises some more general points on the recent literature on the topic.
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Notes
See (Gendler and Szabo 2006). For a survey of the recent literature on the topic, see (Liao and Gendler forthcoming).
A recent example of this tendency is Liao et al. (2014).
See Stock (2013) for a survey of ways in which imagination and fictionality are connected.
(Gendler and Szabo 2006: 159).
(Gendler and Szabo 2006: 162).
This point has been emphasised in various places, see for example Liao (2013). I will use the expressions ‘artistic category’ and ‘genre’ almost interchangeably, but I recognise that there may be subtle distinctions between the two.
(Walton 1990: chapter 4). See also Lewis (1978/1983).
(Walton 1990: 146).
See Sauchelli (2013: 241).
See Lamarque (1990/96), for an early statement of these problems.
In case possible worlds are considered as maximally consistent mereological sums closed under some spatio-temporal relation, as for instance Lewis’s modal realism,
I think that, if at all, ‘perceived immoralities’ are not the only cause of imaginative resistance.
A similar point is made in Brock (2012).
As I understand the notion of a counterpart of a moral claim, a counterpart B in @ of A in F involves at least a minimal variation in content of B with respect to A. The degree of such a variation is specified by a variety of factors.
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Sauchelli, A. Gendler on the Puzzle(s) of Imaginative Resistance. Acta Anal 31, 1–9 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-015-0258-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-015-0258-8