Learning from Fiction?

Storytellers and their audiences over many millennia have thought that we can learn from fiction. Philosopher Gregory Currie challenges that supposition. He doubts knowing can be founded on imagining, and claims that what we think we learn from fiction is not reli­able in the way science or philosophy is, because not tested through peerreview, experi­ment, and argument. He underrates the role of the imagination in understanding all hu­man language, in fictionality outside formal fictions, and in science. Science is not “reliabilist” as Currie assumes: it aims at bold imaginative discoveries that often overturn what had previously been thought secure and may well be displaced by still newer discov­eries. Fiction may not have peer review, but it is tested on the highly developed intuitions of audiences, on the expertise of critics, and through the corrective competition and inno­vations of other storytellers, as Joyce challenges Homer, or David Sloan Wilson’s recent Atlas Hugged challenges Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. There are strong reasons for predicting that fiction has a prosocial bias from which humans over many millennia have learned to expand their sociality. That does not mean that all exposure to fiction is beneficial.

Introduction

Since the 1970s with Stanley Cavell’s work, and later with contributions such as those by Noël Carroll, George Wilson, Gregory Currie, and Berys Gaut, film has become a respectable object of philosophizing among Anglo-Saxon philosophers. Still, when it comes to the relationship between film and philosophy, the focus is mostly on how philosophy can help better understand film with little or nothing on how film studies can contribute to philosophical aesthetics. This special issue is aimed at encouraging a more balanced interaction between analytic aesthetics and film studies.

Revisiting the problem of satisfaction conditions and the indispensability of i-desire

Gregory Currie has argued for the indispensability of i-desires – a kind of imaginative counterpart of desires – by drawing a distinction between the satisfaction conditions of the desire-like states involved in our emotional responses to tragedies and those of genuine desires. Nevertheless, Fiora Salis has recently shown that the same sort of distinction can also be found in nonfictional cases and has proposed a solution to the issue of satisfaction conditions that dispenses with i-desires. In this paper, I refute Salis’s stance and argue for the indispensability of i-desires. For this aim to be achieved, I first argue that the distinction between the satisfaction conditions of i-desires and those of desires can be given a different explanation, and that in this case, the same sort of distinction cannot arise in nonfictional cases; Secondly, I argue that we cannot make sense of the conflict between our desire-like states triggered by fictions and our background desires, and therefore i-desires should be introduced to avoid this conflict.Keywords: i-desires, desire-like imaginings, tragedy, imaginative desires,

Rethinking Role Realism

Role realism is a promising realist theory of fictional names. Different versions of this theory have been suggested by Gregory Currie, Peter Lamarque, Stein Haugom Olsen, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. The general idea behind the approach is that fictional characters are to be analysed in terms of roles, which in turn can be understood as sets of properties (or alternatively as kinds or functions from possible worlds to individuals). I will discuss several advantages and disadvantages of this approach. I will then propose a novel hyperintensional version of role realism (which I will call impossibilism), according to which fictional names are analysed in terms of individual concepts that cannot be matched by a reference (a full-blooded individual). I will argue that this account avoids the main disadvantages of standard role realism.

Gregory Currie: Imagining and Knowing: The Shape of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2020

Book review

Romance de Alexandre: as implicações da sua “pseudoficcionalidade” na história do gênero

Pela definição de Gregory Currie, o Romance de Alexandre é uma “pseudoficção”: um texto que hoje se dá a ler como ficcional, mas que originalmente possuía certo status de verdade, num limiar incerto entre a ficção, a história e a lenda. Isso pode fazer com que ele não pareça exemplar de um gênero que, em regra, tem a ficcionalidade como atributo constitutivo. Esse é, no entanto, um pressuposto que este artigo pretende reabrir, indicando: 1) a concepção tradicional da história do romance que lhe subjaz, a ser substituída, aqui, pela proposição da poligênese do gênero; 2) a discussão sobre o lugar da ficcionalidade num conceito renovado de romance, que atenda ao aumento do corpus implicado na teoria da poligênese. A partir desse enquadramento da teoria e da história do romance, passando pela teoria da ficção, o artigo propõe que, se a marginalidade inicial do romance na cultura erudita se deveu, entre outros motivos, à ambiguidade epistêmica da ficção perante o saber institucionalizado, o status epistêmico ambíguo do Romance de Alexandre pode ter sido importante para a formação do romance, gênero que cavaria para a ficção um domínio social rotinizado. A “pseudoficcionalidade” daquele texto teria colaborado para abrir espaço, no campo letrado, para a exploração aberta da ficcionalidade, assegurando, retrospectivamente, o seu lugar na história do romance.

Intentionalist Strategies of Interpretation

This chapter addresses the complaint that extreme intentionalism standardly forces the reader who engages in interpretation to posit private, or hidden, authorial intentions, for which she has little or no evidence. It is first argued that there are no automatic strategies of interpretation of fictional content: at every stage, whether or not a given interpretative strategy is to be appropriately applied depends on the presence of relevant authorial intention as a sanction. (This section includes a discussion, and rejection, of the views of David Lewis and Gregory Currie about fictional truth; a discussion of the relevance of genre to fictional content; and a consideration of the issue of unreliable narration for an intentionalist view.) The foregoing material on strategies of interpretation is then used to show that it is false to think of the extreme intentionalist as being committed to ‘hidden’ or ‘secret’ meanings in the ordinary case.

The Nature of Fiction

Drawing upon extreme intentionalism, a theory of fiction is built, arguing that a fiction is a set of instructions to a reader, instructing her to imagine various things. Call this ‘the basic claim’. This view is defended against those, such as Gregory Currie, Peter Lamarque and Stein Olsen, and David Davies, who would agree with the basic claim as one condition of fiction, but who would argue that a theory of fiction also needs additional conditions. It is also defended against those, such as Stacie Friend and Derek Matravers, who would reject even that basic claim. Finally there is a consideration of what to say about less straightforward cases, such as split narrative, ‘ambiguous fictions’, ‘fictions within fictions’, unreliable narration, and those cases where a fictional character appears as such in a fiction.