Fiction and Truth
PHI371 Fiction and Truth
Module Convener
Dr Niall Connolly
Office hours: Tuesdays 2-3 & Wednesdays 3-4
Structure of the Course
Two one-hour lectures every week from week 1 to week 11, plus a one-hour seminar every week from week 3 to week 11.
Lecture Times and Locations:
Tue 1-2 HI-LT10 Wed 12-1 NG-G14
Seminar Times and Locations:
Mon 11-12 IC-1.27 Wed 1-2 9MS-G12
Essay Deadline tba
Course Description
Fiction raises puzzles for philosophy. First of all there are the puzzles of non-existence. How can there be truths about non-existent objects (like the truth that Sherlock Holmes is a famous fictional detective)? How is it even possible to think and talk about – so to speak – merely fictional entities? The first part of the course will tackle these puzzles, examining both realist explanations of thought and talk about fictional entities - that take Sherlock Holmes and Hermione Granger to be examples of ‘non-actual’ ‘non-existent,’ or ‘non- concrete’ objects - and anti-realist accounts that deny that there are any such things. This will involve grappling with metaphysical notions like ‘existence’, ‘abstract entity’ ‘possible worlds’ ‘impossible worlds’ and ‘ontological dependence’ as well as with free logics and accounts of engagement with fiction as involving pretence. The second part of the course will focus on a series of puzzles over the notion of ‘true in the fiction’. What is it for something to be true in a fiction? What is the extent of authorial authority? Can it be true in a fiction that it is ok to intentionally kill innocent people? This last question raises the so- called ‘puzzle of imaginative resistance’. The final part of the course will bring some of the insights we will have encountered about fiction to bear on Fictionalism - the view that a type of discourse (e.g. moral discourse, mathematical discourse) is best understood, not as aiming at truth, but rather as a sort of fiction.
*
Because I would like there to be plenty of questions and discussion in the lectures it is hard to be precise about what will be covered in each lecture. But the provisional plan is to spend the first week covering background and basic ideas: particularly ideas from the philosophy of language regarding the meaning of proper names and definite descriptions. The aim is to make clear why the puzzles of non-existence arise and why they are not as easily resolved as you might initially feel they should be. The required reading for these lectures (we will also discuss this famous paper in the seminar in week 3) is W.V. Quine’s “On What There Is”.
Realist approaches (which allow that there are such things as fictional entities) to the puzzles of non-existence will be the focus of the next two weeks. The two most popular types of realist approaches are Meinongianism – Meinongians endorse Alexius Meinong’s infamous thesis that there are things that don’t exist – and Creationism. Terence Parsons’ paper ‘The Methodology of Nonexistence’ is the required reading on Meingongianism. His book: Nonexistent Objects is also worth checking out and it is possible to get the gist of the view without having to plough through the extensive technical sections. Ed Zalta and Graham Priest offer alternative takes on this sort of position. Amie Thomasson’s Fiction and Metaphysics is the most clear and comprehensive elaboration of Creationism. Stacie Friend’s survey article highlights some of the variations within this approach and compares it to anti-realism. Thomasson’s view is that fictional characters are ‘abstract artefacts’: they are created by the authors of fictions and they exist, but they are not concrete people creatures etc. Thomasson compares them to other alleged kinds of dependent entity. The idea that some entities depend for their existence on other, more fundamental entities is very much discussed in metaphysics at the moment, and we will look into this idea.
If you find the proposal that there is such a thing (even an abstract or non-existent thing) as Pegasus, the fictional winged horse, just too silly, then you will be inclined towards an antirealist solution to the puzzles of non-existence. One approach takes the things we say ‘about’ fictional entities to express ‘gappy propositions’ (see David Braun’s paper ‘Empty Names’). Another (see Mark Sainsbury’s book Reference without Reference) takes the logic of our language to be a free logic (free logics allow for truths involving genuinely non- referring names). Perhaps the most popular approach invokes pretence. Kendall Walton’s book Mimesis as Makebelieve sets out in detail the view that engaging with fiction involves participating in a special form of pretence: ‘prop-based make-believe’. It is an obvious and natural thought that an author writing a story is only pretending to talk about wizards or detectives or whatever. What is more controversial is that when I say ‘the character of Harry Potter has featured in seven books and eight movies’ I am only pretending to talk about an individual called ‘Harry Potter’. Anyway we will spend two or three weeks on antirealism. The puzzles of non-existence in all should occupy us for five or six weeks. The next topic - truth in fiction and imaginative resistance - should occupy us for two to three weeks. The required reading on the question of truth in fiction is David Lewis’s classic paper. According to Lewis for it to be true in the Harry Potter stories that some children have magical powers is for it to be the case that, in the closest possible world to ours in which the stories are told as known truth, some children have magical powers. We will look at Lewis’s account, problems with that account, and some alternatives, including the alternative view put forward in Alex Byrne’s paper ‘Truth and Fiction: the Story Continued’. The required reading on the problem of imaginative resistance is Tamar Gendler’s seminal paper: ‘The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance’, and Kathleen Stock’s: ‘Resisting Imaginative Resistance’. Gendler’s article on ‘Imagination’ in the Stanford Encyclopedia notes there are several distinct related puzzles and distinguishes the two main types of strategy that have been adopted in tackling the ‘puzzle of fictionality’: why does it seem that it is can’t be true in the story that punching babies is ok?
The final major topic of the course, which in a way the others build up to and lay the groundwork for, is Fictionalism. We will cover this in the remaining weeks. Mark Sainsbury’s book Fiction and Fictionalism considers fictionalism in the light of questions about the nature of fiction. There are two varieties of fictionalism: hermeneutic fictionalism (see Jason Stanley’s critical article) says that typical participants in a type of discourse (e.g. mathematicians talking about numbers, ordinary people arguing about what is the right thing to do) are only pretending to aim at the literal truth. Revolutionary fictionalism on the other hand doesn’t seek to interpret what people typically mean, it holds that when participating in a type of discourse we should only pretend to speak the literal truth. Fictionalists typically want to avoid controversial ‘ontological commitments’. For instance they want to avoid allowing that there are really such things as numbers or such properties as rightness and wrongness. This is the motivation for passing off talk of numbers, or talk of right of rightness and wrongness as a sort of fiction. Of course it is not clear that fictionalism about, for instance, mathematics, allows us to avoid ontological commitment to abstract objects, if realist approaches to the puzzles of non-existence are defensible. And it is not clear that fictionalism about discourse about necessity and possibility allows us to avoid ontological commitment to other worlds if Lewis’s analysis of truth in fiction is defensible.
We will cover fictionalism as a general approach, and also focus on fictionalism about specific types of discourse: moral discourse (talk of right and wrong is, or should be fictional), and discourse about ordinary objects (tables and chairs are convenient fictions).
Reading List
(required readings are starred and in bold; recommended readings in bold)
I’ve included a wide range of readings but I don’t expect anyone to read most or all of them.
Topic 1 The Puzzle of Nonexistence
Background: thinking and talking about objects.
Frege, G. (1892). “Über Sinn und Bedeutung”, Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, 100: 25–50; translated by M. Black in P.T. Geach & M. Black (eds.), Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980, 56–78. Russell, B. (1905a). “On Denoting”, Mind, 14: 473–493. ––– (1905b). “Critical Notice of: A. Meinong, Untersuchungen zur Gegenstandtheorie und Psychologie”, Mind, 14: 530–538. *Quine, W.V.O. (1948). “On What There Is”, Review of Metaphysics, 2: 21–38. Reprinted in W.V. O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953. Kripke, S. (1972/1980). Naming and Necessity, Oxford: Blackwell
Realism about non-existent objects: Meinongianism
Berto, F. (2011). “Modal Meinongianism and Fiction: the Best of Three Worlds”, Philosophical Studies, 152: 313–334. Caplan, B. (2004). “Creatures of Fiction, Myth, and Imagination”, American Philosophical Quarterly, 41: 331–337. Everett, A. (2005). “Against Fictional Realism”, Journal of Philosophy, 102: 624–649. Fine, K. (1982). “The Problem of Non-Existents. I. Internalism”, Topoi, 1: 97–140. Jacquette, D. (1989). “Mally's Heresy and the Logic of Meinong's Object Theory”, History and Philosophy of Logic, 10: 1–14. Howell, R. (1979). “Fictional Objects: How They Are And How They Aren't.” Poetics, 8: 129–77. ––– (2010). “Fictional Realism and Its Discontents”, in Lihoreau, F. (ed.) (2010). Truth in Fiction, Munich: Ontos Verlag. 153–202. http://www.academia.edu/4892094/Truth_in_Fiction Meinong, A. (1904). “Über Gegenstandtheorie”, in A. Meinong (ed.), Untersuchungen zur Gegenstandtheorie und Psychologie, Leipzig: Barth. Reprinted in Gesammelte Abhandlungen (Gesamtausgabe bd. II), Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1971, 481-535. Translation by I. Levi, D.B. Terrell, & R.M. Chisholm, in R. Chisholm (ed.),Realism and the Background of Phenomenology, Glencoe: Free Press, 1960, 76–117. *Parsons, T. (1979). “The Methodology of Nonexistence.” Journal of Philosophy 76 (11):649-662. - (1980). Nonexistent Objects, New Haven: Yale University Press. - (1982) “Are there Nonexistent Objects?” American Philosophical Quarterly 19 (4): 365 - 371 Priest, G. (2005). Towards Non-Being: the Logic and Metaphysics of Intentionality, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Phillips, J. (2000). “Two Theories of Fictional Discourse,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 37: 107–119. Rapaport, W.J. (1978). “Meinongian Theories and a Russellian Paradox”, Noûs, 12: 153– 180. Reimer, M. (2001). “A “Meinongian” Solution to a Millian Problem” American Philosophical Quarterly 38 (3):233 - 248. Russell, B. (1905b). “Critical Notice of: A. Meinong, Untersuchungen zur Gegenstandtheorie und Psychologie”, Mind, 14: 530–538. Zalta, E. and McMichael, A. (1983). “An Alternative Theory of Nonexistent Objects”, Journal of Philosophical Logic, 9: 297-313 Zalts, E. (1992). “On Mally's Alleged Heresy: A Reply”, History and Philosophy of Logic, 13: 59– 68. ––– (2000). “Pretense Theory and Abstract Object Theory”, in Everett & Hofweber (2000), Empty Names, Fiction and the Puzzles of Non-existence, Stanford: CSLI Publications. 117–147.
Realism about nonexistent objects: Creationism
Brock, S. (2010). “The Creationist Fiction: the Case against Creationism about Fictional Characters”,Philosophical Review, 119: 337–64. Caplan, B. (2004). “Creatures of Fiction, Myth, and Imagination”, American Philosophical Quarterly, 41: 331–337. *Friend, Stacie. “Fictional Characters”, Philosophy Compass 2 (2007): 141–56. Goodman, J. (2004). “A Defense of Creationism in Fiction”, Grazer Philosophische Studien, 25: 131–155. Kripke, S. (2011) “Vacuous Names and Fictional Entitites”, in Philosophical Troubles – Collected Papers vol. 1. New York: OUP. Salmon, N. (1998). “Nonexistence”, Noûs, 32: 277–319. Sawyer, Sarah (2002) “Abstract Artefacts in Pretence” Philosophical Papers, 31 (2). pp. 183-198. Schiffer, S. (1996). “Language-Created Language-Independent Entities”, Philosophical Topics, 24: 149–166. ––– (2003). The Things We Mean, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Schneider, B. & von Solodkoff, T. (2009). “In Defence of Fictional Realism”, The Philosophical Quarterly, 59: 138–149. *Thomasson, A.L. (1999). Fiction and Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ––– (2003a). “Fictional Characters and Literary Practices”, British Journal of Aesthetics, 43: 138–157. ––– (2003b). “Speaking of Fictional Characters”, Dialectica, 57: 205–223. Van Inwagen, P. (1977). “Creatures of Fiction”, American Philosophical Quarterly, 14: 299–308. ––– (2000). “Quantification and Fictional Discourse”, in Everett & Hofweber (2000) Empty Names, Fiction and the Puzzles of Non-existence, Stanford: CSLI Publications. , 235–247. Voltolini, A. (2003). “How Fictional Works Are Related to Fictional Entities”, Dialectica, 57: 225–238. Yagisawa, T. (2001). “Against Creationism in Fiction”, Philosophical Perspectives, 15: 153–172.
- Ontological Dependence, ontological permissiveness and ‘pleonastic entities’
Fine, K. (1994), “Ontological Dependence”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 95: 269–290. *Schaffer, j. (2009). “On What Grounds What”. In David Manley, David J. Chalmers & Ryan Wasserman (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology. Oxford University Press. 347-383 (2009) < http://www.jonathanschaffer.org/grounds.pdf> Schiffer, S. (1996). “Language-Created Language-Independent Entities”, Philosophical Topics, 24: 149–166. ––– (2003). The Things We Mean, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Thomasson, A.L. (1999). Fiction and Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Antirealism about nonexistent objects
Adams, F., Fuller, G., & Stecker, R. (1997). “The Semantics of Fictional Names”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 78: 128–148. *Braun, D. (1993). “Empty Names,” Noûs, 27: 449–469. ––– (2005). “Empty Names, Fictional Names, Mythical Names,” Noûs, 39: 596–631 Brock, S. (2002). “Fictionalism about Fictional Characters”, Noûs, 36: 1–21. Crane, T. The Objects of Thought, Oxford: OUP. 2013 Everett A. The Nonexistent. (2013) Oxford: OUP. Kroon, F. (1994) “A problem about make-believe” Philosophical Studies, 75(3), pp.201- 229 Orenstein, A. (2003). “Fiction, Propositional Attitudes, and Some Truths about Falsehood”,Dialectica, 57: 177–190. Phillips, J. (2000). “Two Theories of Fictional Discourse,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 37: 107–119. *Sainsbury, R.M. (2005). Reference without Referents, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (2009). Fiction and Fictionalism, London: Routledge. ––– (2010). “Fiction and Acceptance-Relative Truth, Belief, and Assertion”, in Lihoreau Lihoreau, F. (ed.) (2010). Truth in Fiction, Munich: Ontos Verlag. 137–152. http://www.academia.edu/4892094/Truth_in_Fiction Reimer, M. (2001). “The Problem of Empty Names.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 79 (4):491 – 506. - (2001). “A “Meinongian” Solution to a Millian Problem” American Philosophical Quarterly 38 (3):233 - 248. Sawyer, Sarah (2012) “Empty names” In: The Routledge companion to philosophy of language. Routledge philosophy companions . Routledge, London, pp. 153-162 *Walton, K.L. (1990). Mimesis as Make-Believe, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Free Logic
Bencivenga, E. (1986) “Free Logics,” in D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner (eds.), Handbook of Philosophical Logic, vol. III: Alternatives to Classical Logic, Dordrecht: D. Reidel, pp. 373–426. Lambert, K. 1983. Meinong and the principle of independence: its place in Meinong's theory of objects and its significance in contemporary philosophical logic. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: Cambridge University Press. - 2001 “Free Logics,” in Lou Goble (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Philosophical Logic, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 258–279. Nolt, J. “Free Logic”, in Stanford Encyclodia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-free/ Sainsbury, R. M., 2005, Reference without Referents, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Topic 2: Truth in Fiction and Imaginative Resistance
Truth in Fiction Alward, P. ‘Truth in fiction: the story concluded’ working paper.
The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance
*Gendler, T. (2000). “The puzzle of imaginative resistance.” The Journal of Philosophy, 97, 55–81. Gendler, T. (2003). “On the relation between pretence and belief”, In M. Kieran & D. Lopes (Eds.), Imagination, philosophy and the arts. Routledge. - “Imagination” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Topic 3 Fictionalism
Brock, S. (2002), “Fictionalism about Fictional Characters”, Noûs, 36: 1–21. *Dorr, C. and G. Rosen (2002) “Composition as a Fiction”, in R. Gale (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Metaphysics, Oxford: Blackwell. (also here: http://philpapers.org/archive/DORCAA.pdf) Eklund, M. (2002) “Peter van Inwagen on Material Beings”, Ratio, 15: 245–56. Eklund, M. (2005) “Fiction, Indifference, and Ontology”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 71: 557–79. Eklund, M. (2009) “The Frege-Geach Problem and Kalderon's Moral Fictionalism”, Philosophical Quarterly, 59: 705–12. Fine, A. (1993) “Fictionalism”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 18: 1–18. Hinckfuss, I. (1993) “Suppositions, Presuppositions, and Ontology”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 23: 595–618. Hussain, N. (2004) “The Return of Moral Fictionalism”, Philosophical Perspectives,18: 149–87. Joyce, R. (2001) The Myth of Morality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. *Joyce, R. (2005) “Moral Fictionalism”, in Kalderon (2005), pp. 287–313. Kalderon, M., (ed.), (2005) Fictionalism in Metaphysics, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kalderon, M., (2005a) Moral Fictionalism, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kennedy, C. and J. Stanley (2009) “On ‘Average’”, Mind, 118: 583–646. Lenman, J. (2008), “Against Moral Fictionalism”, Philosophical Books, 49: 23–32. Lillehammer, H. (2004), “Moral Error Theory”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 104: 95–111. Nolan, D., G. Restall and C. West (2005) “Moral Fictionalism Versus the Rest”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 83: 307–30. Rosen, G. (1990) “Modal Fictionalism”, Mind, 99: 327–54. Rosen, G. (2005) “Problems in the History of Fictionalism”, in Kalderon (2005), pp. 14– 64. *Sainsbury, R.M. (2009) Fiction and Fictionalism, London: Routledge. Sider, T. (1993) “Van Inwagen and the Possibility of Gunk”, Analysis, 53: 285–9. *Stanley, J. (2001) “Hermeneutic Fictionalism”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 25 (1):36–71. < http://philpapers.org/archive/STAHF.pdf> Van Inwagen, P. (1990) Material Beings, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Yablo, S. (2006), “Non-Catastrophic Presupposition Failure”, in J. Thomson and A. Byrne (eds.), Content and Modality: Themes from the Philosophy of Robert Stalnaker, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Seminars
There will be two seminars (you must sign up for one of them) every week from week 3 to week 12. Each seminar will focus on a text. You are required to read this and bring a copy to the seminar.
Week 3: Quine W.V.O. (1948). “On What There Is”, Review of Metaphysics, 2: 21–38. Reprinted in W.V. O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953.
Week 4: Parsons, T. (1979). “The Methodology of Nonexistence.” Journal of Philosophy 76 (11): 649-662.
Week 5: Thomasson, A.L. (1999). Fiction and Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 1.
Week 6: Schaffer, j. (2009). “On What Grounds What”. In David Manley, David J. Chalmers & Ryan Wasserman (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology. Oxford University Press. 347-383 (2009)
Week 7: Walton, K. (1978). “Fearing Fictions”. The Journal of Philosophy 75 (1): 5- 27.
Week 8: Lewis, D. (1978) ‘Truth in Fiction.’ American Journal of Philosophy 15: 37– 46. Reprinted with an added postscript in his Philosophical Papers 1, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. 261-80.
Week 9: Gendler, T. (2000). “The puzzle of imaginative resistance.” The Journal of Philosophy, 97, 55–81.
Week 10: Stanley, J. (2001) “Hermeneutic Fictionalism”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 25 (1): 36–71.
Week 11: Joyce, R. (2005) “Moral Fictionalism”, in M. Kalderon (2005) ed. Fictionalism in Metaphysics, Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 287–313.
Plagiarism
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