Posts on: Fiction
A judge in the New South Wales Supreme Court has decided that Bart and Lisa Simpson are persons under the age of 16.
This is odd. According to The Simpsons, Bart and Lisa are certainly persons under the age of 16; but 'according to The Simpsons, P' does not entail P, I would have thought. Indeed, according to the Simpsons, Bart and Lisa exist, while in reality they don't. And since Bart doesn't exist, no-one is Bart Simpson; so in particular, every person under the age of 16 is not Bart Simpson; therefore Bart Simpson is not a person under the age of 16.
1. There is nowadays considerable evidence for the existence of pulsars. Still, it isn't incoherent to worry that the evidence might be misleading and pulsars don't exist after all. But it is incoherent to worry that pulsars might be the apple trees in my parents' garden. These apple trees aren't neutron stars, and they don't emit regular pulses of electromagnetic radiation, and things that don't do that don't deserve the name "pulsar".
2. Suppose we are convinced by van Inwagen's arguments that fictional characters are abstract entities created by authors and denoted by our fictional names. This suggests the following picture: Over and above our material universe there is a special realm of abstract fictional characters. Everytime an author writes a novel, new entities pop up in this fictional realm. There is no causal connection from the fictional realm to our world. But then how do we know about the fictional characters? How can we be sure for example that the creation of fictional characters is reliable? Couldn't it happen from time to time that a fictional character fails to be created? If so, perhaps Madame Bovary exists, but Sherlock Holmes doesn't. In which case it would be false (on the Kripke-van Inwagen account) that Sherlock Holmes was invented by Conan Doyle or that he is a widely known fictional character. Isn't our confidence in such assertions rather mysterious and irresponsible given that really we have no access at all to the fictional realm? At the very least, the exceptionless correspondence between what our authors do here on Earth and what happens in the fictional realm cries for explanation!
A sentence is true in a fiction iff it is true at certain worlds, say, at the closest worlds where the pretense which the narrator and the audience engage in is not only pretense. But to evaluate whether the sentence is true at a world, do we treat the world as actual or as counterfactual?
It seems that there could easily be stories in which water isn't H20, and Hesperus isn't Phosphorus. This suggests that the worlds must be treated as actual. However, it isn't clear that these terms ("water" etc.) are sufficiently rigid, and if not, there are also worlds as counterfactual where the identities fail. Could there be a story in which the stuff that actually is water isn't the stuff that actually is H2O? I'm not sure.
This comment by Gideon Rosen in the fascinating thread on IR at TAR made me smile:
Consider two opinionated journalistic essays on the same controversial topic ? say, the morality of Sharon-style extra-judicial killing, and suppose it's clear that both writers agree on the underlying facts. One says that the killings are unjustified because they violate a fundmental moral right to due process. The other says that there is natural rights are nonsense on stilts and that the killings are justified because they maximize utility. [...]
Brian still believes that impossibilities are true in some fictions. I still disagree. But I wonder if the disagreement is substantial. Of course I agree that in some fictions one can find impossible statements. The question is whether these statements are true in the fiction. Not everything that is explicitly said in a fiction is true in the fiction. I'm now inclined to believe that our conception of truth in fiction may be ambiguous: on the standard conception, impossible fictions are ruled out; but on a different conception, they are tolerated. Let's call the former conception 'intensional' and the latter 'hyperintensional'.
In his paper on
Imaginative Resistance, Brian Weatherson says that the impossibility
theory can't be true because "there are science fiction stories, especially
time travel stories, that are clearly impossible but which do not generate
resistance". Since you're reading this blog, you've probably also read the recent
entry on TAR where Brian discusses time travel
movies. Interestingly, he begins by noticing that "some [of these movies]
seemed unintelligible even on relatively generous assumptions". I agree,
and I would say that these are cases of imaginative resistance: A story
tells me that certain facts obtain, but I find it unintelligible how these
facts could obtain. Maybe we don't get the kind of immediate phenomenal
resistance experienced in paradigm examples of IR, but I don't think this
has any philosophical significance. I think it is largely due to the fact
that we are not clever enough: We can't be struck by an impossibility if
noticing the impossibility requires careful reasoning and keeping track of
exactly what happened at various earlier passages in the story.
Fictionalism about a certain discourse is the view that statements belonging to this discourse are to be interpreted like statements in fictional discourse.
Now as Brian has observed, on the common account of fictional discourse, "Fictional(Fa)" implies "(Ex)Fictional(Fx)" (even though it normally doesn't imply "(Ex)Fx"). So one might think that on the common account, fictionalism can't do with fewer entities than realism, even though it can do with different entities. However, the common account is not committed to "Fictional(a != b)" implying "(Ex)(Ey)(x != y)". After all, it usually allows for "(Ex)(Fictional(Fx) and Fictional (not-Fx))", so why not allow for "(Ex)(Fictional(x != b) and Fictional(x = b))"? So maybe one could endorse fictionalism about mathematics and the common account of fictional discourse without being committed to an infinity of entities by claiming that all the "numbers" talked about in mathematics are in fact identical.
My wrists still don't feel quite fine, in particular after writing such a
long piece as this one. So this will probably be the last entry for another
couple of days.
I want to defend the Impossibility Hypothesis about Imaginative
Resistance. The hypothesis is that when we find ourselves unwilling to
accept that some statement explicitly made in a fiction is true in
the fiction, this is (always) because what the statement says is in some
sense conceptually impossible.
In chapter 10 of The Varieties of Reference, Gareth Evans endorses a
counterfactual analysis of truth in games of make-believe: When children
play the mud pie game, an utterance of "Harry placed the pie in the oven"
is true (in the game) iff (roughly) it would be true given that these globs
of mud were pies and this metal object were an oven.
He then notices that this is a problem for the possible worlds analysis of
counterfactuals because the relevant counterfactuals seem to have
impossible antecedents: "there simply are no possible worlds in which these
mud pats are pies" (p.355).
Not much blogging these days because for some reason my wrist
hurts, and I think it's better to let it rest for a while. So here are
just a couple of brief remarks, typed with my left hand, about some
parallels between fictional and and historical characters.
We might distinguish two modes of speaking about historical
characters:
1. Past: Immanuel Kant is a philosopher; he lives at Königsberg;
etc.
2. Present: Immanuel Kant does not exist; he does not live at Königsberg;
etc.
Here comes a positive theory of fictional characters. Disclaimer: Only
read when you are very bored. I've started thinking and reading about
this topic just a weak ago, so probably the following 1) doesn't make much
sense, 2) fails for all kinds of well-known reasons, and 3) is not original
at all. The main thesis certainly isn't original: it is simply that
fictional characters are possibilia. Anyway, I begin with an account of
truth in fiction, which largely derives from what Lewis says in "Truth in
Fiction".
J
from Blogosophy proposes that we use "in a manner of speaking" instead
of "accoring to the fiction" as a prefix for fictional statements. This, J
says, would also work for the problematic cases like "Sherlock Holmes
consumed drugs that are illegal nowadays". I'm afraid I don't quite
understand this operator. What are the truth conditions of "in a manner of
speaking, p"?
This is part 2 of my comments on Fiction and
Metaphysics.
Amie Thomasson argues that fictional objects are not as strange and special as
one might have thought because they belong to the same basic ontological
category as works of art, governments, chairs and other objects of everyday
life. Doing without fictional entities, she says, would merely be "false
parsimony" unless one can also do without other entities of this category.
I have three complaints.
Brian has made so many puzzling remarks about fictional characters being
real but abstract that I've decided to read Amie Thomasson's Fiction and
Metaphysics. Here is my little review.
Thomasson's theory, in a nutshell, is that the Sherlock Holmes stories
are not really about the adventures of a detective who lives at 221B Baker
Street, but rather about the adventures of a ghostly, invisible character
who lives at no place in particular and never does anything at all. We
don't find this written in the Sherlock Holmes stories because, according
to Thomasson's theory, Arthur Conan Doyle simply doesn't tell the truth
about Holmes. In fact the only thing he gets right is his name: That
ghostly character he is telling wildly false stories about is really called
"Sherlock Holmes".
I've finished the exercises. I still have to put together some of the
solutions, but since Word always crashes when I draw complicated tables and
trees, I've decided to take a break in order to save my mental health. (In
fact, Word not only crashes frequently in these cirumstances, it also
deletes the currently open file while crashing.) So now I'm working
on the Frege paper again, which I really want to finish soon.
Brian Weatherson has
posted a
couple of interesting
entries on imaginative resistance.
I am not an expert on modal fictionalism, so probably something is obviously wrong with the following objection. But anyway, here it is.
Modal fictionalism claims that any statement S about possible worlds (and other possibilia) is to be analysed as "According to the possible-world-story, S". Now possible worlds are used in reductive analyses of all kinds of concepts: modality, counterfactuals, causation, laws, properties, propositions, meanings, probabilities, supervenience, fictions, etc. For instance, an analysis of indexicals usually talks about extensions in possible contexts of utterance. If fictionalism is right, then this analysis must in turn be analysed in terms of extension in possible contexts according to the possible-worlds-story. And this seems rather odd. Suppose I propose some theory T of indexicals (or laws or whatever). If fictionalism is right then T is correct iff it is implied by some story about possible worlds. Firstly, intuitively this is not at all what I would have thought my theory was about. Secondly, which possible-world-story is relevant here? If we take the five or six claims about recombination and other worlds being of the same kind as ours usually presented by fictionalists (e.g. Rosen 1990), all the analytic projects mentioned above appear to be doomed: That simple story will not imply anything at all about indexicals, or laws, or causation. Unless of course we extend it by some analysis of these notions. Which analysis? The obvious candidate is the analysis we believe to be true, that is, T. But then all the analytic projects mentioned above come out as trivially true: Even the craziest theory will be good enough to imply itself.