Impossible fictions are valuable evidence both for a theory of fiction and for theories of meaning, mind and epistemology. This article focuses on what we can learn about fiction from reflecting on impossible fictions. First, different kinds of impossible fiction are considered, and the question of how much fiction is impossible is addressed. What impossible fiction contributes to our understanding of "truth in fiction" and the logic of fiction will be examined. Finally, our (...) understanding of unreliable narrators and unreliable narration in fiction needs to accommodate stories that, on the face of it, cannot possibly be true. (shrink)

Abstract Impossible fictions have lessons to teach us about linguistic representation, about mental content and concepts, and about uses of conceivability in epistemology. An adequate theory of impossible fictions may require theories of meaning that can distinguish between different impossibilities; a theory of conceptual truth that allows us to make useful sense of a variety of conceptual falsehoods; and a theory of our understanding of necessity and possibility that permits impossibilities to be conceived. After discussing these (...) questions, strategies for resisting the picture of impossible fictions presented here and in Part I are discussed. Perhaps apparently impossible fictions describe possibilities after all; or perhaps impossible fictions are all trivial; or perhaps some apparently intelligible impossible fictions are unintelligible after all. (shrink)

Impossible fictions are not just the creations of puzzle-seeking philosophers or artists experimenting with the limits of fiction. Impossibilities can be found in relatively mundane fiction as well. This article argues that the device of personification, especially of abstract entities such as death or duty, yields impossible fictions, arguing against a number of strategies that might be tried to show that these cases of personification do not yield impossibilities.

We present a theory of truth in fiction that improves on Lewis's [1978] ‘Analysis 2’ in two ways. First, we expand Lewis's possible worlds apparatus by adding non-normal or impossible worlds. Second, we model truth in fiction as belief revision via ideas from dynamic epistemic logic. We explain the major objections raised against Lewis's original view and show that our theory overcomes them.

This paper is concerned with the status of mathematical fictions in Leibniz’s work and especially with infinitary quantities as fictions. Thus, it is maintained that mathematical fictions constitute a kind of symbolic notion that implies various degrees of impossibility. With this framework, different kinds of notions of possibility and impossibility are proposed, reviewing the usual interpretation of both modal concepts, which appeals to the consistency property. Thus, three concepts of the possibility/impossibility pair are distinguished; they give rise, (...) in turn, to three concepts of mathematical fictions. Moreover, such a distinction is the base for the claim that infinitesimal quantities, as mathematical fictions, do not imply an absolute impossibility, resulting from self-contradiction, but a relative impossibility, founded on irrepresentability and on the fact that it does not conform to architectural principles. In conclusion, this “soft” impossibility of infinitesimals yields them, in Leibniz view, a presumptive or “conjectural” status. (shrink)

I argue that modal realism is unable to account for fictional discourse. My starting point is an overview of modal realism. I then present a dilemma for modal realism regarding fictional characters. Finally, I provide responses to both horns of the dilemma, one motivating modal dimensionalism, the other motivating a disjunctive analysis of modality.

Quel peut-il être, le rôle de la fiction dans la (re)construction des émotions liées à l’extermination de masse? Et que se passe-t-il au juste, quand ces émotions sont réactivées à partir du point de vue d’un bourreau? En revenant sur les questions suscitées par un cas singulier et symptomatique ( Les Bienveillantes, de J. Littell), puis en examinant certaines critiques affectant la référence à la tragédie antique en relation avec la littérature du génocide, j’essaie de mettre ici en regard deux (...) types de critiques de la notion de catharsis : l’une, contemporaine, qui conduit à la remise en cause éthique des usages qui en sont faits comparant les émotions liées à l’expérience de l’extermination à celles que la tragédie est censée pouvoir provoquer ; l’autre, issue d’une tradition libertine propre au xvii e siècle, faisant planer le doute sur la nature (et la possibilité même) du processus cathartique, et sur les « scénarios paradigmatiques » que certaines tragédies mettent en branle au sein d’une mise en commun de certaines émotions. Un tel détour ne pourrait-il pas conduire à interroger, dans une perspective différente, l’impact de l’art sur notre manière d’expérimenter, de caractériser et d’évaluer des émotions telles que la Terreur et la Pitié aujourd’hui même? (shrink)

We need to understand the impossible. Francesco Berto and Mark Jago start by considering what the concepts of meaning, information, knowledge, belief, fiction, conditionality, and counterfactual supposition have in common. They are all concepts which divide the world up more finely than logic does. Logically equivalent sentences may carry different meanings and information and may differ in how they're believed. Fictions can be inconsistent yet meaningful. We can suppose impossible things without collapsing into total incoherence. Yet for (...) the leading philosophical theories of meaning, these phenomena are an unfathomable mystery. To understand these concepts, we need a metaphysical, logical, and conceptual grasp of situations that could not possibly exist: Impossible Worlds. This book discusses the metaphysics of impossible worlds and applies the concept to a range of central topics and open issues in logic, semantics, and philosophy. It considers problems in the logic of knowledge, the meaning of alternative logics, models of imagination and mental simulation, the theory of information, truth in fiction, the meaning of conditional statements, and reasoning about the impossible. In all these cases, impossible worlds have an essential role to play. (shrink)

Impossible Worlds focuses on an exciting new theory in philosophy, with applications in metaphysics, logic, and the theory of meaning. Its central topic is: how do we meaningfully talk and reason about situations which, unbeknownst to us, are impossible? This issue emerges as a central problem in contemporary philosophical accounts of meaning, information, knowledge, belief, fiction, conditionality, and counterfactual supposition. The book is written bytwo of the leading philosophers in the area and contains original research of relevance to (...) professional philosophers and logicians working in metaphysics, philosophy of language, formal logic, and adjacentareas. (shrink)

The details of evil will sink any attempt at theodicy. But details of evil are usually- or even necessarily- lost in the abstract discussions of evil in philosophical texts. Hence this essay looks at the details of tragic fiction, specifically in some stories by Faulkner. The initial analysis endeavors to show that fiction gets us closer to the reality of agency than philosophy and so it then gets us closer to the reality of the evils that haunt both individuals and (...) cultures. Finally, the details of the evil analyzed reveal that human beings are actually capable of a self-destruction that annihilates the very grounds of human agency and identity: Faulkner’s tragic fiction reveals that self-destruction is written into the necessary components of agency and identity. (shrink)

Do fictions depend upon imagination? Derek Matravers argues against the mainstream view that they do, and offers an original account of what it is to read, listen to, or watch a narrative. He downgrades the divide between fiction and non-fiction, largely dispenses with the imagination, and in doing so illuminates a succession of related issues.

Authors have a lot of leeway with regard to what they can make true in their story. In general, if the author says that p is true in the fiction we’re reading, we believe that p is true in that fiction. And if we’re playing along with the fictional game, we imagine that, along with everything else in the story, p is true. But there are exceptions to these general principles. Many authors, most notably Kendall Walton and Tamar Szabó Gendler, (...) have discussed apparent counterexamples when p is “morally deviant”. Many other statements that are conceptually impossible also seem to be counterexamples. In this paper I do four things. I survey the range of counterexamples, or at least putative counterexamples, to the principles. Then I look to explanations of the counterexamples. I argue, following Gendler, that the explanation cannot simply be that morally deviant claims are impossible. I argue that the distinctive attitudes we have towards moral propositions cannot explain the counterexamples, since some of the examples don’t involve moral concepts. And I put forward a proposed explanation that turns on the role of ‘higher-level concepts’, concepts that if they are satisfied are satisfied in virtue of more fundamental facts about the world, in fiction, and in imagination. (shrink)

In this paper, I appeal to a distinction made by David Lewis between identifying and determining semantic content in order to defend a complementarity thesis expressed by Anjan Chakravartty. The thesis states that there is no conflict between informational and functional views of scientific modeling and representation. I then apply the complementarity thesis to well-received theories of pictorial representation, thereby stressing the fruitfulness of drawing an analogy between the nature of fictions in art and in science. I end by (...) attending to the problem of depicting impossible fictions. It is suggested that progress can be made by understanding the role of impossible fictions in science, namely, allowing researchers to probe into the possible structure and representational capacities of scientific theory. (shrink)

Fictional realists hold that fictional characters are real entities. However, Anthony Everett [“Against Fictional Realism”, Journal of Philosophy (2005)] notes that some fictions leave it indeterminate whether character A is identical to character B, while other fictions depict A as simultaneously identical and distinct from B. Everett argues that these fictions commit the realist to indeterminate and impossible identity relations among actual entities, and that as such realism is untenable. This paper defends fictional realism: for (...) class='Hi'>fictions depicting non-classical identity between A and B, the realist should hold that there are two salient fragments, one with a single character (named both ‘A’ and ‘B’) and the other with two (named ‘A’ and ‘B’, respectively). Truth according to the fiction depicting indeterminate identity is determined by supervaluating over truth according to those salient fragments. For fictions depicting impossible identity, truth is determined by subvaluating over truth according to those two salient fragments. (shrink)

It is widely believed, among philosophers of literature, that imagining contradictions is as easy as telling or reading a story with contradictory content. Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight, for instance, concerns a knight who performs many brave deeds, but who does not exist. Anything at all, they argue, can be true in a story, including contradictions and other impossibilia. While most will readily concede that we cannot objectually imagine contradictions, they nevertheless insist that we can propositionally imagine them, and regularly (...) do, simply by entertaining a text which prompts us to do so. I argue that this narrative does not bear scrutiny for two main reasons. First, because propositional imagining is beside the point, where truth in fiction is concerned; evaluating truth in fiction engages the cognitive architecture in ways that prohibit the mobilization of merely propositional imagination to that end. And second, because it is not obvious, given the strategies usually suggested, that we ever propositionally imagine contradictions in the first place—in fact, it seems we go out of our way to avoid directly imagining them. (shrink)

The recent discussion of fictional models has focused on imagination, implicitly considering fictions as something nonconcrete. We present two cases from synthetic biology that can be viewed as concrete fictions. Both minimal cells and alternative genetic systems are modal in nature: they, as well as their abstract cousins, can be used to study unactualized possibilia. We approach these synthetic constructs through Vaihinger’s notion of a semi-fiction and Goodman’s notion of semifactuality. Our study highlights the relative existence of such (...) concrete fictions. Before their realizations neither minimal cells nor alternative genetic systems were any well-defined objects, and the subsequent experimental work has given more content to these originally schematic imaginings. But it is as yet unclear whether individual members of these heterogeneous groups of somewhat functional synthetic constructs will eventually turn out to be fully realizable, remain only partially realizable, or prove outright impossible. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue for two interrelated theses. First, if we take phenomenological psychopathology seriously, and want to understand what it is like to undergo various psychopathological experiences, we cannot treat madpeople’s testimony as mere data for sane clinicians, philosophers, and other scholars to analyze and interpret. Madpeople must be involved with analysis an interpretation too. Second, sane clinicians and scholars must open their minds to the possibility that there may be experiences that other people have, which they (...) nevertheless cannot conceive of. I look at influential texts in which philosophers attempt to analyze and understand depersonalization and thought insertion. They go astray because they keep using their own powers of conceivability as a guide to what is or is not humanly possible to experience. Several experiences labeled inconceivable and therefore impossible by these philosophers, are experiences I have had myself. Philosophers and others would be less likely to make this mistake if they would converse and collaborate more with the madpeople concerned. When this is not feasible, they should nevertheless strive to keep an open mind. Fantastical fiction may have a role to play here, by showing how bizarre experiences may nevertheless be prima facie conceivable. (shrink)

We outline a neo-Meinongian framework labeled as Modal Meinongian Metaphysics (MMM) to account for the ontology and semantics of fictional discourse. Several competing accounts of fictional objects are originated by the fact that our talking of them mirrors incoherent intuitions: mainstream theories of fiction privilege some such intuitions, but are forced to account for others via complicated paraphrases of the relevant sentences. An ideal theory should resort to as few paraphrases as possible. In Sect. 1, we make this explicit via (...) two methodological principles, called the Minimal Revision and the Acceptability Constraint. In Sect. 2, we introduce the standard distinction between internal and external fictional discourse. In Sects. 3–5, we discuss the approaches of (traditional) Meinongianism, Fictionalism, and Realism—and their main troubles. In Sect. 6 we propose our MMM approach. This is based upon (1) a modal semantics including impossible worlds (Subsect. 6.1); (2) a qualified Comprehension Principle for objects (Subsect. 6.2); (3) a notion of existence-entailment for properties (Subsect. 6.3). In Sect. 7 we present a formal semantics for MMM based upon a representation operator. And in Sect. 8 we have a look at how MMM solves the problems of the three aforementioned theories. (shrink)

Les théories contemporaines de la fiction, comme les poétiques de la Renaissance, privilégient une conception de la mimesis fondée sur la vraisemblance : la démonstration du profit cognitif et moral de la fiction passe toujours par une définition de l’imitation (de quelque façon qu’on la définisse) fondée sur la rationalité. L’auteur de cet article examine tout d’abord le statut des contradictions et de l’impossible chez quelques théoriciens actuels (principalement J.-M. Schaeffer, M.-L. Ryan, L. Doležel) et poéticiens du 16e siècle (...) (L. Castelvetro et F. Patrizi). Sont ensuite étudiées la forme et la fonction que prend l’impossible dans trois fictions narratives de la Renaissance. L’hypothèse majeure qui est défendue est que ces paradoxes permettent de penser le non-existant, dans la continuité de la scolastique médiévale et en relation avec une problématique religieuse, sérieuse ou parodique. Par là même, et en raison de leur auto-référentialité constitutive, les paradoxes inscrivent dans la fiction une réflexion sur elle-même qui n’a rien d’une apologie. La pensée de la fiction s’articule en définitive de façon bien différente dans les théories et dans les fictions elles-mêmes. (shrink)

The author analyzes fictions of legal positivist philosophy and their role in the scientific legitimation of modern law and political domination. The original function of legalist fictions was the establishment of legal science, which would be autonomous and independent of other social sciences and public morality. In the second half of the 20th century, legal positivist philosophy has nevertheless adopted the fiction of the just law as its scientific legitimation fiction and incorporated moral and political discourse into legal (...) science, again.Legal positivism and its critiques within the discourse of the sociology of law and critical legal science keep the image of a hierarchical and centralized legitimation of law. Paradoxically, current legal philosophy and theory searching for a universally valid legitimation scheme is full of many different legitimations and reveals their growing plurality and the impossibility of establishing one sovereign legitimation scheme in the current social, theoretical and political condition. (shrink)

This paper provides an account of truth in interactive fiction. Interactive fiction allows the audience to make choices, resulting in many different possible fictions within each interactive fiction, unlike in literary fiction where there is just one. Adequately capturing this feature of interactive fiction requires us to address familiar issues regarding impossible fiction and the nature of time in fiction. Truth in interactive fiction thus requires a complex account to capture its multitude of fictions. It is argued (...) that a full account of truth in interactive fiction requires distinguishing two works for each interactive fiction, which contain distinct fictional truths. The actual work encompasses what is in fact represented as fictional (hence mistakes can be fictionally true in this work), whilst in the implied work, truth in fiction is governed by authorial intention, hence mistakes are not fictionally true. This dual account best captures our aesthetic evaluation of interactive fictions, for which we often need to distinguish how the work actually is from how it was intended to be. (shrink)

Suppositional reasoning can seem spooky. Suppositional reasoners allegedly (e.g.) “extract knowledge from the sheer workings of their own minds” (Rosa), even where the knowledge is synthetic a posteriori. Can literary fiction pull such a rabbit out of its hat? Where P is a work’s fictional ‘premise’, some hold that some works reason declaratively (supposing P, Q), imperatively (supposing P, do Q), or interrogatively (supposing P, Q?), and that this can be a source of knowledge if the reasoning is good. True, (...) I will argue, although only within the context of judicious critical interpretation. Further evident constraints include that the form of the suppositional reasoning needs to be declarative or imperative, and that the fictional ‘premise’ of the work needs to be a metaphysical counterfactual possibility, not merely a temporal counterfactual and not merely an epistemic possibility or probabilistic supposition. (shrink)

What can we learn about the world from engaging with fictional time-series--stories involving time travellers, recurring and rewinding time, and foreknowledge of the future? Do they show us radical alternative possibilities concerning the nature of time, or do they show that even the impossible can be represented in fiction? Neither, so this book argues. Defending the view that a fiction represents a single possible world, the authors show how apparent representations of radically different time-series can be explained in terms (...) of how worlds are represented without there being any fictional world which has such a time-series. In this way, the book uses the complexities of fictional time to get to the core of the relation between truth in fiction and possibility. It provides a logic and metaphysics to deal with the fact that fictions can leave certain features of their fictional worlds indefinite, and draws comparisons and connections between fictional and scientific representations and hypotheses. (shrink)

Drawing on different suggestions from the literature, we outline a unified metaphysical framework, labeled as Modal Meinongian Metaphysics (MMM), combining Meinongian themes with a non-standard modal ontology. The MMM approach is based on (1) a comprehension principle (CP) for objects in unrestricted, but qualified form, and (2) the employment of an ontology of impossible worlds, besides possible ones. In §§1–2, we introduce the classical Meinongian metaphysics and consider two famous Russellian criticisms, namely (a) the charge of inconsistency and (b) (...) the claim that naïve Meinongianism allows one to prove that anything exists. In §3, we have impossible worlds enter the stage and provide independent justification for their use. In §4, we introduce our revised comprehension principle: our CP has no restriction on the (sets of) properties that can characterize objects, but parameterizes them to worlds, therefore having modality explicitly built into it. In §5, we propose an application of the MMM apparatus to fictional objects and defend the naturalness of our treatment against alternative approaches. Finally, in §6, we consider David Lewis’ notorious objection to impossibilia, and provide a reply to it by resorting to an ersatz account of worlds. (shrink)

In two studies, 5- and 6-year-old children were questioned about the status of the protagonist embedded in three different types of stories. In realistic stories that only included ordinary events, all children, irrespective of family background and schooling, claimed that the protagonist was a real person. In religious stories that included ordinarily impossible events brought about by divine intervention, claims about the status of the protagonist varied sharply with exposure to religion. Children who went to church or were enrolled (...) in a parochial school, or both, judged the protagonist in religious stories to be a real person, whereas secular children with no such exposure to religion judged the protagonist in religious stories to be fictional. Children's upbringing was also related to their judgment about the protagonist in fantastical stories that included ordinarily impossible events whether brought about by magic or without reference to magic . Secular children were more likely than religious children to judge the protagonist in such fantastical stories to be fictional. The results suggest that exposure to religious ideas has a powerful impact on children's differentiation between reality and fiction, not just for religious stories but also for fantastical stories. (shrink)

The canonical version of possible worlds semantics for story prefixes is due to David Lewis. This paper reassesses Lewis's theory and draws attention to some novel problems for his account.

The way Leibniz applied his philosophy to mathematics has been the subject of longstanding debates. A key piece of evidence is his letter to Masson on bodies. We offer an interpretation of this often misunderstood text, dealing with the status of infinite divisibility in nature, rather than in mathematics. In line with this distinction, we offer a reading of the fictionality of infinitesimals. The letter has been claimed to support a reading of infinitesimals according to which they are logical (...) class='Hi'>fictions, contradictory in their definition, and thus absolutely impossible. The advocates of such a reading have lumped infinitesimals with infinite wholes, which are rejected by Leibniz as contradicting the part–whole principle. Far from supporting this reading, the letter is arguably consistent with the view that infinitesimals, as inassignable quantities, are mentis fictiones, i.e., (well-founded) fictions usable in mathematics, but possibly contrary to the Leibnizian principle of the harmony of things and not necessarily idealizing anything in rerum natura. Unlike infinite wholes, infinitesimals—as well as imaginary roots and other well-founded fictions—may involve accidental (as opposed to absolute) impossibilities, in accordance with the Leibnizian theories of knowledge and modality. (shrink)

In Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre explains love as a strategy for achieving control over "being-for-others," the objectified aspect of the self-imposed by others' defining looks. Two contemporaneous fictions by Sartre, The Room (1939) and Dirty Hands (1948), expand the notions of love and of being-for-others in surprising directions. Dirty Hands shows the creative, productive potential of being-for-others: Hugo's reliance on the other for his self-definition paradoxically generates his decisive embrace of being for-itself. The Room dramatizes the role of (...) the family in constituting a child's subjectivity: Eve's family situation explains her ontological imprisonment in the dimension of being-for-others. The two stories' tolerant vision of the complex social and psychological reasons for adopting being-for-others as one's dominant modality contrasts with Sartre's rigorous critique of reliance on being-for-others as a form of bad faith in Being and Nothingness. The fictions' enlarged perspective on human love and on being-for-others provides a framework for complicating and critiquing the ontological categories presented in Being and Nothingness. (shrink)

Personification has received little philosophical attention, but Daniel Nolan has recently argued that it has important ramifications for the relationship between fictional representation and possibility. Nolan argues that personification involves the representation of metaphysically impossible identities, which is problematic for anyone who denies that fictions can have impossible content. We develop an account of personification which illuminates how personification enhances engagement with fiction, without need of impossible content. Rather than representing an identity, personification is something that (...) is done with representations—a matter of use rather than content—and involves only a comparison of possibilities. We illustrate our account using the personification of death in the film Meet Joe Black, and show that there are no grounds for taking it to be fictionally true that there is a metaphysically impossible identity between Death and death. (shrink)

Imagination comes with varying degrees of sensory accompaniment. Sometimes imagining is phenomenologically lean (cognitive imagining); at other times, imagining involves or requires sensory presentation such as mental imagery (sensory imagining). Philosophers debate whether contradictions can obtain in fiction and whether cognitive imagining is robust enough to explain our engagement with fiction. In this paper, I defend the Principle of Poetic License by arguing for the Permissive View of fictional truth: we can have fictions in which a contradiction is true, (...) everything is true, or nothing is true. I show that imagination-based worries about impossible, unlimited, and empty fictions can be shown to be about sensory imagination and that sensory imagination isn’t necessary for fictional truth. (shrink)

Events that violate the laws of nature are, by definition, impossible, but recent research suggests that people view some violations as “more impossible” than others. When evaluating the difficulty of magic spells, American adults are influenced by causal considerations that should be irrelevant given the spell’s primary causal violation, judging, for instance, that it would be more difficult to levitate a bowling ball than a basketball even though weight should no longer be a consideration if contact is no (...) longer necessary for support. In the present study, we sought to test the generalizability of these effects in a non-Western context – China – where magical events are represented differently in popular fiction and where reasoning styles are often more holistic than analytic. Across several studies, Chinese adults showed the same tendency as American adults to honor implicit causal constraints when evaluating the plausibility of magical events. These findings suggest that graded notions of impossibility are shared across cultures, possibly because they are a byproduct of causal knowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:R. D. Ackerman BELIEVING IN A FICTION: WALLACE STEVENS AT THE LIMITS OF PHENOMENOLOGY The "ring of men" of "Sunday Morning" will chant their "devotion to the sun, / Not as a god, but as a god might be, / Naked among them, like a savage source" (CP, pp. 69-70).' Solar nakedness is deferred even as it is named. The problem for belief is the question of appearance and (...) representation. Things appear as and like.... The phenomenological return to things is also a turn to fiction, as Husserl understood: "If anyone loves a paradox, he can really say... that the element which makes up the life of phenomenology... is fiction. ' " The sun is divine, and it is not; it is both naked and clothed, savage and civilized, source (or end) and means. But such paradox is ultimately unsatisfying, and as we will see with Stevens, the need for belief—for an image or idea of totality—forces the issue of fiction and reality. The Stevens we will have in view is not the Stevens—as if there were such a creature. Our Stevens is the one most persuaded by promises such as those of phenomenology, the one most concerned with decreation (reduction) and fresh beginnings, with discovery and recognition, with imagination, the body, and the earth. This is the Stevens for whom the barrier of language presages at last not absence and difference but fictive recovery of presence and identity, the one for whom poetry represents a way of belief beyond mysticism even as it bodes mythic proximity. Finally, this is the Stevens who predominates throughout the prose (as well as in much of the poetry), who tries mightily to secure a belief while disencumbering himself of metaphysics—but alas, I think, with small success. Although Stevens's association of the problem of belief with the idea of fiction occurs in early poems such as "A High-Toned Old Christian 79 80Philosophy and Literature Woman" and "To the One of Fictive Music," his most intensive involvement with fiction as belief dates from the early 1940s and spans the period of his major essays and his last four volumes of poems. He recounts, for instance, a 1942 conversation with a student: "I said that I thought that we had reached a point at which we could no longer really believe in anything unless we recognized that it was a fiction. The student said that that was an impossibility, that there was no such thing as believing in something that one knew was not true. It is obvious, however, that we are doing that all the time" (L, p. 430). What does it mean to believe in a fiction? That is my main subject here, as we seek out the limits of the phenomenological Stevens. His letters of this period are preoccupied with the problem of fictive belief: "If one no longer believes in God (as truth), it is not possible merely to disbelieve; it becomes necessary to believe in something else.... A good deal of my poetry recently has concerned an identity for that thing.... In one of the short poems that I have just sent to the harvard advocate, I say that one's final belief must be in a fiction. I think that the history of belief will show that it has always been in a fiction" (L, p. 370). The poem referred to, "Asides on the Oboe," begins: The prologues are over. It is a question now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose. (CP, p. 250) Acknowledging that "in the long run, poetry would be the supreme fiction" (L, pp. 430-31), Stevens nonetheless singles out the nominative function of poetry as the essence of its claim to supremacy: "Poetry means not the language of poetry but the thing itself.... The subject matter is what comes to mind when one says of the month of August... 'Thou art not August, unless I make thee so'" (L, p. 377). The quoted line (also from "Asides") underscores the paradox that for Stevens the essence of fiction (the nontrue) is its capacity to nominate the true or the real. This... (shrink)

An important yet often unacknowledged aspect of moral discourse is the phenomenon of moral impossibility, which challenges more widely accepted models of moral discussion and deliberation as a choice among possible options. Starting from observations of the new possibilities of anti immigrant attitudes and hate crimes which have been described by the press as something being “unleashed,” the paper asks what it means for something to enter or not the sphere of possibility in the moral sense, and whether it is (...) ever desirable for something to remain or be pushed back outside the realm of the morally possible. Three forms of moral impossibility are identified: the unconceived, the unthinkable, and moral incapacity. Through the discussion of a stark fictional example of moral impossibility, the paper concludes that while the category of moral impossibility cannot settle disagreement, it sheds light on some of the most fundamental aspects of moral life. (shrink)

Often called the first of its kind, Frankenstein paved the way for science fiction writing. Its depiction of a then impossible scientific feat has in our time become possible and is essentially recognizable in what we now refer to as bioengineering, biomedicine, or biotechnology. The fiction of Frankenstein has as it were given way to scientific fact. Of more importance, however, is the challenge Mary Shelley’s novel presents to the ostensibly high-minded and well-intentioned hopes and promises of the scientist/technologist. (...) Finally, the fictional character, Victor Frankenstein, has come to serve as the poster child and whipping boy for all scientific and technological irresponsibility, so much so that thanks to him we are able to free ourselves and our scientists from any real responsibility, since none of us ever would or could be as monstrous as Frankenstein. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Pleasures of FictionDenis DuttonHuman Beings Expend staggering amounts of time and resources on creating and experiencing art and entertainment—music, dancing, and static visual arts. Of all of the arts, however, it is the category of fictional story-telling that across the globe today is the most intense focus of what amounts to a virtual human addiction. A recent government study in Britain showed that if you add together annual (...) attendances in plays and cinema with hours watching television drama, the average Briton spends roughly 6% of all waking life watching dramatic performances. And that figure does not even include books and magazines: further vast numbers of hours spent reading short stories, bodice-rippers, mysteries, and thrillers, as well as so-called serious fictions, old and new.The origins of this obsession with comic and dramatic fictions are lost in remote prehistory, as lost as the origins of language itself. But like language, we know the obsession with fiction is universal: stories told, read, and dramatically or poetically performed are independently invented in all known cultures, literate or not, having advanced technologies or not. Wherever printing arrives, it is used to reproduce fictions. Whenever television appears in the world, soap operas soon show up on the schedule. Both the forms that fiction takes and the ideas, types of characters, and kinds of conflict that make up its content can be shown to be strikingly similar across cultures. It has specialist practitioners—rhapsodes, novelists, playwrights, actors—and is governed both informally with stylistic conventions and sometimes formally—for example, by censorship laws. A love of fiction is as universal as governance, marriage, jokes, religion, and the incest taboo. [End Page 453]The question for any general aesthetics is: Why? Joseph Carroll is a literary theorist who has applied his probing mind over the last decade to the origins, nature, and functions of literary experience. His new collection of essays and reviews, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (Routledge, $85.00 boards, $23.95 paper) looks at literature and literary theory through the lens of evolutionary psychology. At the same time, Carroll's eye is that of an extremely perceptive literary critic. In fact, I would judge him to be one of the most acute and knowledgeable readers of fiction I've ever encountered. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that he is sometimes dubious, or even scathing, about evolutionary explanations of literature that have been offered up by writers whose grasp of psychology exceeds, in his opinion, their command of high literature. His complaints, however, are not to the fundamental notion that evolution by natural and sexual selection have made human beings into the story-loving animals they have become: his adjustments are intended to increase the accuracy and usefulness of Darwin's revolution. However critical he is of evolutionary psychologists, Carroll remains a Darwinian through and through.Carroll holds that the only way to attain a general theory of literature is through an account of human nature that builds from the ground up, from the most basic conditions for the evolution of the human species. A Darwinian literary theory first needs a Darwinian psychology. Once we have a basic Darwinian psychology in place, we can see that the narrative proclivities of human beings, far from being an incidental by-product of the evolved mind, are central to some of its most human functions. The structures of basic motives and dispositions are what would be appropriate for a species, as Carroll describes it, that "is highly social and mildly polygynous, that displays concealed ovulation, continuous female receptivity, and postmenopausal life expectancy corresponding to a uniquely extended period of childhood development, that has extraordinary aptitudes for technology, that has developed language and the capacity for peering into the minds of its conspecifics, and that displays a unique disposition for fabricating and consuming aesthetic and imaginative artifacts." Such a list alone, he contends, would make it impossible to imagine a blank-slate view of the mind, in which the mind evolves in a vacuum, goes onto produce culture, which then gives back to the mind all content and structure.Some of the mental processes that grow from... (shrink)

. Standard considerations of philosophy of science are reformulated in psychological terms and arguments, suggesting a fundamental change in life perspective: subjective experiences or introspective data are subject to motivational biases and therefore not admitted as objective empirical facts in science, However, we never experience objects or events of the external world, i.e., so called objective facts, but exclusively subjective percepts or mental events. They are merely assumed to, but may or may not be accurate or distorted mental representations of (...) objects or events of an external world. Accordingly, the latter are theoretical constructs, i.e., constructs of the fictitious but most successful predictive (implicit) theory, called external world, which seems to be constructed from regularities observed in mental events and serves as a reference fiction for, erroneously called empirical, tests of predictions of scientific theories. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of the semantics of fiction have tended to be problematic in one of two ways: either they have denied that items used in fictional discourse have their plain meaning, introducing complications into otherwise satisfactory accounts of semantics, or they have posited special kinds of entities, introducing complications into otherwise satisfactory accounts of ontology. Accounts that tried to avoid these problems by positing mere possibilia as fictional entities were thought to be hopeless inasmuch as it was thought impossible (...) to pick out unique mere possibilia, and there could be no causal connection to them of the sort that was thought to be necessary for reference. I proposed to try to deal with the first problem by using counterfactuals, which each pick out a relatively small, constrained set of possible worlds, and presumably could so limit the possibilia contained in them to make picking out unique ones possible. I improve on David Lewis' counterfactual semantics for fiction by altering the analysis to make the experience of a hypothetical listener central, rather than the actions of a hypothetical narrator. As for the second, I show bow the causal theory of names can plausibly be expanded to a counterfactual theory of names, which would allow for naming across possible worlds. I conclude that fictional names rigidly designate mere possibilia, which allows for a more normal semantics for fiction than had seemed possible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Teaching Musical FictionMarcin Stawiarski (bio)IntroductionGiven the increasing interest in musico-literary studies, I wish to examine some ways in which music can be used for pedagogical purposes in teaching literature. It has been widely recognized that music and poetry sprang from the common origin of chant or incantation.1 Throughout the ages, the sister arts sometimes went hand in hand and sometimes parted company, but since the end of the nineteenth (...) century musical aspects have been used quite extensively in literature, either as a subject matter or as a wellhead of structures. The number of musically inspired twentieth-century novels bears evidence to this strengthening of musico-literary relationships.2 Contemporary interactive, interdisciplinary, and multimedial works of art or artistic events also testify to a close sisterhood between the arts. This phenomenon has come to be called intermediality, which is defined as using more than one artistic medium in the creation of a work of art. But then, examining musical aspects in literature demands specific knowledge of the musical field itself, thus raising questions about the limits and the difficulties of using musico-literary materials in class. Suppose the student is not knowledgeable at all about music. What, then, can be the input the teacher can offer the student without necessarily inundating the latter with too much information? Is it possible to avoid generalizations in drawing comparisons or distinctions between music and literature? And, is it relevant to deal with music in teaching fiction?I wish to suggest that there are pragmatic elements of music that may be used in teaching music-related texts without previous skills in the musical field. In this respect, music may serve as an enriching and fascinating teaching tool. The point I would like to make is that quite often music leads the text to raise questions about literariness itself, so that it becomes possible not only to discuss musico-literary interrelations but to tackle the specificity of literature through the prism of intermediality. [End Page 78]This article will deal with two kinds of musico-literary phenomena appearing in fiction. On the one hand, I wish to examine the implications of the historical and cultural background in musicalized texts as an inherent aspect of many novels. On the other hand, I wish to broach the question of the musicalization of fiction, that is to say, the transposition or imitation of musical forms in literature.Literature Speaking about MusicThe Need of a ContextIn dealing with musical contexts of literary texts, the teacher may bring the student's attention to bear on the variety of ways a text may be related to music. A typology of different musico-literary interrelations has been established by such critics as Calvin S. Brown3 or Steven P. Scher. In Scher one will find a useful chart dividing musico-literary studies into two categories: literary presence within the musical field (explored by musicology) and musical presence within the literary field (explored by literary studies). The latter may be subdivided into word music, musical structures, and verbal music. This typology has been furthered by Werner Wolf in his critical work on the musicalization of fiction. Yet too detailed a categorization may seem difficult to put into practice in a classroom setting. Its principle drawback lies in the difficulty to sever one musical phenomenon in literature from the other. In numerous cases it seems impossible to drive an unequivocal wedge between (a) prosodic phenomena, appertaining to word music or musicality; (b) exclusively thematic or topical elements; and (c) specifically structural transpositions. Such an accurate classification, therefore, preferably would be used with more advanced students.The thematic or topical relationship I want to focus on in this section is by far the easiest to get across to students since it does not require musical skills. This approach is roughly tantamount to Scher's verbal music or Wolf's thematization,4 and it appears in texts dealing with music explicitly. Many texts resort to an extramusical (or paramusical) rather than a purely musical content. In other words, it is the critical or mythical context surrounding a given musical work that is often used in fiction. In reading Rose Tremain... (shrink)

Possible-worlds semantics proved itself as a strong tool in analysing the statements of actuality, possibility, contingency and necessity. But impossible phenomena go beyond the expressive power of the apparatus. The proponents of possible-worlds apparatus thus owe us at least three stories. The first one is the story about ontological nature of possible worlds, the second one is the story about the theoretical role such entities play and the third one is the story about the impossible. Modal Realism (MR) (...) provides us with a positive story regarding the first and the second, but denies impossible worlds. Extended Modal Realism (EMR) adds a positive story about the third point too. This book is an attempt to paraphrase extended modal realism in different metaphysical frameworks. In Chapter I, I outline the theory of modal realism, its systematic account of modality and its ontological commitments. I also motivate an impossible-worlds discourse as well as a systematic appeal of extending the picture beyond the possible. I then propose several definitions of the concept of ‘impossible world’ (or impossible possible world). Finally, I discuss a particular metaphysics behind the concept - extended modal realism. Chapter II considers the epistemological worry associated with (MR) and (EMR) and concludes that although the worry is justified, there can be epistemological justification of the theory. Next, I outline the so-called indispensability argument for the legitimacy of mathematical Platonism. Finally, I argue that the argument, if accepted, can be applied to metaphysics in general, to the existence of concrete possibilia (and impossibilia) in particular. Chapter III focuses on the analysis of (EMR). To be more precise, I present a so-called advanced modalizing problem which seems to be infecting every genuinely realistic theory of modality. In this chapter, I propose a way of treating extraordinary modal claims by means of plurality of logical spaces. The next three chapters provide different ways of understanding (EMR). Namely, Chapter IV develops and defends Extended Modal Dimensionalism (EMD). (EMD) is realism about spaces, times and worlds—metaphysical indices that make objects spatial, temporal and modal, respectively. Metaphysical indices play the role of alethic relativisers, i.e. items to which matters of truth are relativized. The chapter examines several arguments against modal dimensionalism and shows that it offers a feasible way to understand (EMR). Chapter V offers a structural approach to possible and impossible worlds: Extended Modal Structuralism (EMS). In particular, I consider whether it makes sense to think of logical models in isolation from the concrete world but without their being divorced from all spatiotemporal totalities. The metaphysics of structure developed in this chapter assumes that structural properties of possible and impossible worlds are primitive and objective. However, I provide some characterisations of their logical and metaphysical behaviour, as well as guidelines for talking about them. Finally, Chapter VI proposes yet another metaphysical framework of hybrid modal realism. I present theories of (MR), (EMR) and modal fictionalism respectively, their advantages and drawbacks. Finally, I propose a so-called hybrid view. Roughly, the view is that one might be a modal realist when it comes to possibilia, but turn into fictionalism regarding impossibilia. The approach is dubbed Extended Modal Fictionalism (EMF) a version of fictionalism according to which claims made within a certain discourse are better to be understood as a sort of ‘fiction’, rather than as a literal truth. (shrink)

Since the late thirteenth century, the counterfactual Filioque debate, i.e., the question whether the Son and the Holy Spirit were distinct persons in the Trinity if the Holy Spirit only proceeded from the Father and not also from the Son, was an interesting context for developing the methodology of extreme thought experiments and the logic of conditionals with impossible antecedents and paradoxes of implication. In the mid-1620s, Puente Hurtado de Mendoza introduced a strongly critical approach towards the scientific merits (...) of positing certain types of impossible scenarios while joining this traditional debate in his Tractatus de Trinitate. He argued that the counterfactual Filioque problem is a needless detour and either shifts to unreliable discussions of properties of fictional entities or is outright trivial for logical reasons. The present article offers a modern edition of the ninth disputation of Hurtado’s Tractatus de Trinitate and analyses logical and methodological aspects of Hurtado’s position in the counterfactual Filioque debate. (shrink)

Four instances of how science fiction contributes to the elucidation of novelty in the context of discovery are considered by extending existing discussions on temporal and use-novelty. In the first instance, science fiction takes an already well-known theory and produces its own re-interpretation; in the second instance, the scientific account is usually straightforward and whatever novelty that may occur would be more along the lines of how the science is deployed to extra-scientific matters; in the third instance, science fiction takes (...) an idea that appears impossible within the delimitations of reality and produces a universe where such a possibility becomes feasible; and in the fourth instance, science fiction extends from an idea already known at the time of the work’s production to simulate a possibility that could emerge should the extension be experimentally viable. However, the article will not end with a mere evaluation of these instances, but also proposes instances on how science fiction could contribute to new ways of experiencing, discerning, and working with scientific knowledge. (shrink)

This volume presents new essays on the propositional imagination by leading researchers. The propositional imagination---the mental capacity we exploit when we imagine that everyone is colour-blind or that Hamlet is a procrastinator---plays an essential role in philosophical theorizing, engaging with fiction, and indeed in everyday life. Yet only recently has there been a systematic attempt to give a cognitive account of the propositional imagination. These thirteen essays, specially written for the volume, capitalize on this recent work, extending the theoretical picture (...) of the imagination and exploring the philosophical implications of cognitive accounts of the imagination. The book also investigates broader philosophical issues surrounding the propositional imagination. The first section addresses the nature of the imagination, its role in emotion production, and its sophistication manifestation in childhood. The essays in the second section focus on the nature of pretence and how pretence is implicated in adult communication. The third section addresses the problem of 'imaginative resistance', the striking fact that when we encounter morally repugnant assertions in fiction, we seem to resist imagining them and accepting them as fictionally true. In the final section, contributors explore the relation between imagining, conceiving, and judgements of possibility and impossibility. The Architecture of the Imagination will be an essential resource for the growing number of philosophers and psychologists studying the nature of the imagination and on its role in philosophy, aesthetics, and everyday life. (shrink)

I ask whether and when historical inaccuracy in a work of art constitutes an aesthetic flaw. I first consider a few replies derived from others: conceptual impossibility, import-export inconsistency, failure of reference, and imaginative resistance. I argue that while there is a grain of truth to some of these proposals, none of them ultimately succeeds. I proceed to offer an alternative account on which the aesthetic demerits of historical inaccuracies stem from a violation of the conversational contract between author and (...) audience. The key question is what that contract implies. (shrink)

This article approaches the COVID-19 pandemic as an inherently antagonistic phenomenon. To do so, it carries forward the philosophical contentions that Žižek outlines in his Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World, as well as his wider work. With reference to the parallax Real and McGowan’s Hegelian contradiction, it is demonstrated that Žižek’s philosophical premises hold a unique importance in politically confronting COVID-19. Indeed, by drawing specific attention to the various ways in which our confrontations with the Real expose the limitations of (...) our socio-ideological orders, it is argued that it is in these very limitations that the limits of the Real are transposed through the various “fictions” we employ to fight and perceive it. In outlining this confrontation, a focused discussion on the Real as “impossible” – a “characteristic” that affords an important political significance for the present context and its ongoing limitations – is provided. In conclusion, if the COVID-19 pandemic demands a new “commons”, and if our response to the crisis should be one where the desires of the nation-state are regulated and controlled, then, it may not simply be enough that we “demand the impossible”. Instead, it is today that the impossible demands a new “us”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 215-232 [Access article in PDF] Eighteenth-Century Print Culture and the "Truth" of Fictional Narrative Lisa Zunshine As a session entitled "Truth" at a recent Modern Language Association of America annual convention has demonstrated, the obsession with the epistemologies of truth is alive and well. Our "familiar ways of thinking and talking about truth," as one of the speakers, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, observed, remain "theoretically (...) elusive, discursively slippery, and hard or perhaps impossible to articulate clearly in relation to other current concepts and ideas" 1 --an irresistible invitation to further thinking and talking on the subject. My essay enters this conversation by attempting to contemplate truth not as a stable attribute but as a ongoing attribution, that is, not as an inherent property but rather as a dynamic process predicated upon functional idiosyncrasies of our evolved cognitive architecture. The broad question posed here is this: What if our never-ending quest for truth is itself cognitively constructed and the various forms that this quest takes manifest the (not necessarily harmonious) interaction between our evolved cognitive capacities and the ever-changing specifics of our cultural environment?Consider just one of the forms of such an interaction, namely, our age-long preoccupation with the "truth" of literary narrative. In many respects, this preoccupation is counterproductive: the most "fantastic" story contains a number of contingently useful "truths" about the world, whereas the most "factual" narrative manipulates facts by virtue of being a narrative or a subjective arrangementof information. Still, we persevere in wanting to put the label "fiction" or "nonfiction" onto any story that comes our way. As I will argue, the bookstore's organization of its sections satisfies this species of "cognitive" craving as well as [End Page 215] reinforces it, making it seem culturally inevitable. Viewed from this perspective, our culture appears to be a multifaceted feedback mechanism engaged in the process of satisfying, reinforcing, struggling with, and manipulating our cognitive predispositions.The cultural manipulation of our cognitive predispositions is the topic of the present essay, which discusses several examples of such manipulation that respond to our desire to assign a certain "truth-value" to a given narrative, i.e., to attach a label to it announcing its "factuality" or "fictionality." "Truth-value" is a loaded term, resisting definition, and liable to lead me into trouble. Imperfect as it is, however, I need it in order to shuffle between two scholarly discourses that do not (yet) have much vocabulary in common: literary criticism and cognitive science. The reason for turning to cognitive science in my discussion of literary narrative is that cognitive anthropologists and psychologists frequently engage the same problems that we do when we ask, What is "Fiction"? How is it different from "History"? How do we decide whether what we are reading is "true?" The key difference between the two approaches is, however, that whereas the literary critic focuses on specific texts produced and read in specific cultural circumstances, the cognitive anthropologist pays attention to the cross-cultural insistence with which people wish to and often claim to distinguish "truth" from "fiction" and inquires into the possible evolutionary history of the cognitive architecture implicated in our never-ending quest for "truth." The latter perspective can thus be useful for literary studies because, by suggesting that our evolved cognitive architecture often "encourages" us to construe the world as a negotiation of "truths" and "nontruths," this perspective begins to account--at least on some level--for the fact that people may approach a complex cultural artifact, such as a novel, with a "truth"/"non-truth" binary in mind that is ultimately not very productive. 2 Evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists frequently point to disjunctions between the tasks that our brain evolved to solve and the tasks that we have to deal with in the modern environment; our vexed insistence on determining the truth-value of the 500-page printed narrative--not an object one would come across in the Pleistocene--can be seen as yet another instance of such a disjunction.Thus, I suggest that, on the... (shrink)

There have been many objections to the possibility oftime travel. But all the truly interesting ones concern the possibility of reversecausation. What is objectionable about reverse causation? I diagnose that the trulyinteresting objections are to a further possibility: that of causal loops. I raisedoubts about whether there must be causal loops if reverse causation obtains; but devote themajority of the paper to describing, and dispelling concerns about, various kinds ofcausal loop. In short, I argue that they are neither logically nor (...) physically impossible.The only possibly objectionable feature that all causal loops share is that coincidenceis required to explain them. Just how coincidental a loop will be varies: some arereally quite ordinary, and some are incredibly unlikely. I end by speculating thatthe tendency amongst physicists to avoid discussion of causal loops involving intentionalaction may have been unfortunate, since intentional action is an excellent way tonon-mysteriously bring about what otherwise would have been an unlikely coincidence. Hencecausal loops may be more likely in a world with beings like us, than in one without. (shrink)

Utopia can be conceived as a possibility – a space within language, a set of principles, or the product of technological development – but it cannot be separated from questions of place, or more accurately, questions of “no place.” 1 In between the theoretically imaginable utopia and its realisation in a particular time and place, there is a space of critique, which is exploited in anti-Utopian and critical dystopian narratives. 2 In Science Fiction narratives of this kind, technology is responsible (...) for the transformation of the utopian impulse into a set of principles that are precisely stated and rigidly enforced. The critique focuses on the impossibility, due to the reductive force of instrumental reason, of any systematic realisation of a eutopia where the positive qualities of freedom, individualism and creativity are nurtured. The films Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg , and Gattaca, written and directed by Andrew Niccol , both examine utopian claims through speculation on the possible future use of current technologies, the tools of crime investigation and the genome project respectively. However, an examination of the plot cannot attend sufficiently to the particular properties of film and how it, as a medium, constructs utopia as a place. This article aims to address this issue by examining how technologically derived images of utopia are realised in the visual space of film, that is, on the level of the mise en scène. These images are often dystopian but the distinction between dystopia and eutopia is not crucial to the argument, because the aim is not to return utopian ism to its place at the vanguard of progressive politics, nor to reject utopianism on the basis that it is unrealisable, but rather to examine how technology and utopianism can combine in the visual language of film. My concern here is to investigate how utopia is conceived according to the specific features of the medium rather than to present an overarching narrative judgement as to the value of utopian principles. In Gattaca, the utopianism of a genetically determined future is reproduced in the mise en scène as a set of aesthetic principles, whereas in Minority Report the utopian technology itself resembles the apparatus of film. This involves two quite different approaches to the visualisation of utopia: 4 in Gattaca, utopia is embodied in a society in which there can be “no other place,” realised through the subtraction or reduction of visual difference; in Minority Report, utopia is an expression of a panoptic regime that can incorporate all visual and cultural difference such that the visible is “every place.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:JOSEPH MARGOLIS THE LOGIC AND STRUCTURES OF FICTIONAL NARRATIVE The fascination of fiction and narrative is plainly immense, sind current analyses are notably fresh and ingenious. But ifone were to venture a compendious account of die most strategic conceptual claims bearing on those notions, they might well be captured by the following three theses: (i) that fiction and narrative are logically quite distinct, without necessarily excluding one anodier; (ii) (...) that fictional worlds are no worlds at all; they are merely imagined to exist; and (iii) that events, whether actual or imagined, cannot be specified independently of the categories by which we identify them as the events they are, categories subject to change over time. What is intriguing about mese three claims is that they strike the ear as utterly commonplace and obvious. But that is dieir strength. For it would be a great convenience if the relevant puzzles generated by analytic philosophy, hermeneutics, the new narratology, semiotics and the like could be resolved, convincingly, by appeal to die implications of these diree homely trudis. In addition, diey affect one another in a rather complicated way, and, taken joindy, easily expose certain influential false starts. The import of (iii), for example, is notably ignored in die otherwise powerful analysis of narrative afforded by Gérard Genette. Its bearing on (i) utterly undermines the explicit dualism favored by Seymour Chatman, who is clearly influenced by Genette himself. The failure to mark die force of (i) and its analogue regarding poetry is most obvious in I. A. Richards's contrast between poetry and science, the work of the Prague circle, Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, and such recent speech-act theories of poetry and fiction as those proposed by Richard Ohmann, Monroe Beardsley, and Mary Louise Pratt. The corresponding failure widi respect to (ii) is clear in John Searle's theory of reference and in die ontological claims made by Nicholas Wolterstorff. The connection between (i) and (ii) is muddled most famously by G. E. Moore. These charges suggest die quarrelsome promise of the intended economy. But, as we shall see, they also lead in the direction of a more constructive theory of texts and their interpretation and of die constraints of narrative and style diat affect fiction. 162 Joseph Margolis163 Fiction, we say, differs from reality as well as from legend. But in speaking thus, we betray an understandable confidence that these three kinds of"world"— or, these three worlds — are conceptually well-behaved and open to straightforward demarcation. Once more, we slip altogether too easily between talking about certain worlds and about the narrative accounts by which we do so. What distinguishes fictional reference? we ask, and what is a fictional world? The best way to proceed here is to begin with strong intuitions and to trace dieir systematic consequences in order to test how far they are unassailable — or whether and where they must yield to others that are more accommodating. One particularly promising equivocation is the following. We speak of fictional worlds as possible (but not actual) worlds; but even if what is possible in a fictional world corresponds (in some sense) to what is possible in the actual world, it is not, as such, a possibility of or at the actual world. The "possible worlds" idiom is fundamentally and doubly equivocal. For, a "possible world" signifies either what is merely logically or conceptually compossible, or what (under suitably referential, predicative, causal, and similar constraints) is compossible specifically with respect to the actual world (or some part of it). Certainly, Balzac's La Cousine Bette "presents" an imaginary world that is internally coherent and compossible. One might even say, ignoring its fictive nature, diat such a world — or events very much like those of the story — is compossible with a certain portion of the actual world of nineteenth-century France. But Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderfond, though it scrupulously presents a coherent world of compossible events, does not present a world compossible with the actual world. And, on certain views at least, Thomas Mann's The Transposed Heads presents a possible world that is a conceptual impossibility. There is, however, no need to quarrel about particular cases... (shrink)