We outline a theory of one puzzling aspect of human cognition: a tendency to exaggerate the degree to which agency is manifested in the world. We call this over‐coherent thinking. We use Pylyshyn's idea of cognitive penetrability to help characterize this notion. We argue that this kind of thinking is essentially narrative in form rather than theoretical. We develop a theory of the relation between the degree of narrativity in a representation and its aptness to represent, and to express, mind. (...) We review the prospects for several theories about how over‐coherent thinking gains a purchase on motivation. We argue that progress in this difficult area may require the abandonment of a categorical belief/imagination distinction in favour of vaguely specified clusterings in a many‐dimensional cognitive space. We conclude with the idea that an error‐prone system for the retention of ideas that are low in some of the characteristics generally thought desirable in belief might emerge as a result of an arms‐race between deceivers and deceiver‐detectors. (shrink)

The article treats verbal irony in the poetry of two emblematic Estonian poets, Heiti Talvik and Betti Alver. The texts analysed are from the 1930s. Following the example of many scholars of irony, I have distinguished between two basic types of irony: verbal irony and situational irony. The first departs from the traditional definition of irony (saying one thing and meaning the contrary) and centres on the use of language, on certain verbal and stylistic devices that make the receiver of (...) the text perceive it as ironic. Situational irony refers to the recognition of the coexistence of incompatible opposites, to the feeling of the most absurd unexpectedness. The aim of the article is to locate and explain the functioning mechanisms of this verbal device in the poetry of Heiti Talvik and Betti Alver. First, there are ironies based on antonyms and/or on the negation of predication, which can be categorized as instances of classic rhetorical irony. We find in Talvik’s and Alver’s poetry few metaphors that can be explained as simple ironic metaphors (L is said but metaphorically N is meant, which in turn must be changed to its opposite value to reach the final referent N ->M=~N). Metonymy has a great inherent potential for irony: if the whole is represented by one of its parts, this often produces a mocking effect, which is the basic characteristic of irony. One can identify a particular kind of ironic metonymy in Talvik’s and Alver’s poetry when proper names (such as Casanova or Jeanne d’Arc) are used to indicate certain traits (the art of living and courage), while actually meaning the opposite (triviality and cowardice). Similar to the first group of classic irony are those instances where ironic oppositions between what is said and what is meant are not based on antonyms but rather on the difference between the highest, the most valuable level, of the imaginable scale and the zero point; for example, what is said is noble, but what is meant is ridiculous. In Alver’s poetry, there are texts that imply antonymic ironic oppositions (pastpresent, local-foreign, sensibility-reflection) but it is not possible to decide for either pole, since ambivalence remains. Well known among scholars of irony, Dan Sperber’s and Deirdre Wilson’s theory of irony as a type of mention is superbly applicable to instances interpreted as ironic in Talvik’s and Alver’s poetry. As Sperber and Wilson have explained, “use of an expression involves reference to what the expression refers, mention of an expression involves reference to the expression itself” (Sperber, Wilson 1981: 303); in the case of irony, the speaker produces a phrase, hinting at the same time that it is improper, ridiculous or in some other way unsuitable to the situation. The theory of irony as a type of mention fits well with Oswald Ducrot’s theory of the polyphony of language, which distinguishes between the speaker (locuteur) and the enunciator (énonciateur). In ordinary discourse, these often coincide, but irony is one of the cases in which the speaker produces statements that he himself does not believe in. In Alver’s and Talvik’s poetry, there are many instances of irony which can best be explained as the mention of an opinion held by another which is unacceptable to the speaker himself. Quite similar to irony as a type of mention is ironic role play in which the speaker is clearly not identifiable with the implied author, since the role taken is opposed to the standpoint of the implied author. Talvik’s and Alver’s poetry does not contain pure role play but only elements of it. (shrink)

In attempting to answer whether Nabokov’s Lolita can be described as an unethical novel, the author ponders on what basis one could make such a determination. At (1) the author analyzes the merited-response argument offered by Gaut (and previously Hume and Carroll), which provides a conceptual framework for the resolution of the controversy surrounding Lolita. Based on this analysis, (2) the author decides what constitutes the novel’s ethical foundation and what (3) prescriptions and (4) responses can follow from it.

The question is whether Urmson's account depicts Austin's method needs a qualified answer. Roughly, the answer is that what it presents is not Austin's method because it is not the whole of Austin's method. Urmson confines his attention to aspects of the inner structure of the method and leaves out the question of its motivation and possible aims.

[Translator's]: The flight of Voyager 1 past Saturn in 1981 provides an occasion for a semiotic comparison of reports in French newspapers, a popular science article, and specialized scientific articles in Nature. The texts differ in the distance supposed between reader and writer, in the treatment of human and nonhuman actors, in characterization of the event and assumptions about readers' interest in it, and in their narrative structure. The analysis shows that popular izations and specialized scientific articles are not related (...) in a simple dichotomy or scale and cannot be explained by a notion of the "general public"; rather, the various types of texts must be considered in terms of more complex relations between what are called in semiotic terms the enunciator and the enunciatee. (shrink)

“Place” as an argumentative domain, which has been taken for granted and treated by theorists of argumentation simply as a physical notion designating the occasion where an argumentation takes place, carries far more complex meanings beyond its traditionally assumed domain in the following three dimensions: as a geographical locale; as a concept, an idea, a history or a notion with its own disputable narratives and presumptions; and as an imaginative geography. Similarly, an image or a character projected through argumentative discourse (...) should be among the central concerns for argumentation studies, however, limited attention has nevertheless been paid to this traditional face of argument in general and the collective face in particular. We argue that image is a site of discursive production, a symbolic field or a discursively disputable space. The discursive interplay among “place,” “image,” “argument” and “time” offer a new way of thinking about ethotic argument and its key role in the establishment of discursive credibility. (shrink)

"En una entrevista que le hice al escritor mexicano Luis Arturo Ramos a mediados de los años ochenta, le pregunté sobre su interés en Cortázar. Al plantear esta pregunta, noté una reacción física negativa, como si la mera mención del autor argentino fuera ofensiva o tal vez un ataque. Y su respuesta verbal fue parecida, negando de forma contundente cualquier presencia de Cortázar; no seguí más esa línea de preguntas y cambiamos de tema...".

While reading literary works, what do readers experience? Do they experience only the words they listen to or read? How can we describe the experience of reading literary works? Do phantasy and imagination play any role during such experiences? These kinds of questions usually give rise to a twofold kind of research: on the one hand, a philosophical effort of combing through literature itself as a philosophical object of study, and — on the other hand — an attempt to argue (...) for a cognitive portrait of those processes triggered by reading or listening to words. Nevertheless, if we put aside these two sets of studies, which are plenty widespread and partly related to scientific branches, three new and interwoven ways of broaching the issue of literary experience come to light: 1) readers’ experiences of literary worlds; 2) readers’ visual involvement in literary experiences; 3) phantasy’s and imagination’s involvement in such experiences. These issues are strongly interwoven since each of them deals with the experience of reading literary works from slightly different perspectives: the first concerns the objects of literary experiences, the second focuses on a specific component of literary experiences, while the third aims at comprehending what role is up to phantasy and imagination during such experiences. The following research purports to answer the aforementioned questions and, in so doing, it develops and argues for the following thesis, which is the heart of the matter: reading literary works means experiencing literary worlds and, consequently, describing literary experiences means describing the literary worlds we experience while reading literary works. (shrink)

In the past few decades, a growing number of philosophers have tried to explain the phenomenon of imaginative resistance, or why readers often resist the invitation of authors to imagine morally deviant fictional scenarios. In this paper, I critically assess a recent proposal to explain IR in terms of a failure of empathy, and present a novel explanation. I do so by drawing on Peter Goldie’s narrative account of empathic perspective-taking, which curiously has so far been neglected in the IR-literature. (...) I argue that, in some cases, IR is due to a partial confusion of two kinds of imaginative perspective-taking towards a fictional character: an internal, genuinely empathic, perspective-taking, on the one hand, and an external, crypto-empathic, stance that can be characterized as in-her-shoes-imagining, on the other. I argue that, in the cases at issue, IR is not so much a resistance to imagining but, rather, to empathically enacting an evildoer’s moral and phenomenal first-person perspective. I conclude by considering some more general lessons that follow from my account for what has recently been called sadistic empathy and point to an unresolved issue for future thinking about IR. (shrink)

Based on a paper delivered at a conference devoted to carnivalesque studies, this article focuses attention on Rand's masterwork, Atlas Shrugged. By utilizing the carnivalesque techniques of Menippean satire and the “dialogic” interplay of narrative voices, with trickster-heroes as the agents of social change, the author argues that Rand ruthlessly deconstructs the logic of command economies and models a society turned, as Bakhtin would say, “topsy turvy” in favor of pure free enterprise. In doing so, she also contests the political (...) boundaries of a stereotypically left-wing genre whose scholars are also typically Marxian. (shrink)

This article considers Catullus’ reaction to his brother’s death and argues that the poet, having found the masculine vocabulary of grief inadequate, turns to the more expansive emotions and prolonged dedication offered by mythological examples of feminine mourning. I begin by showing how Catullus complicates his graveside speech to his brother in poem 101 by invoking poems 65, 68a, and 68b. In these compositions, Catullus likens himself to figures such as Procne and Laodamia, and their feminine modes of grief become (...) associated with the poet. While these women’s grief brings them to a dreadful end, in my second reading of poem 101 I show how Catullus incorporates their emotional intensity and devoted attention into a masculine performance of mourning. Connecting his voyage to his brother’s grave with Odysseus’ journey, Catullus valorizes his single-minded remembrance of his sibling, even as he acknowledges that he will never overcome the distance between them. (shrink)

This thesis explores the ethical impact of literary narrative fictions on the reader. It does so by focusing mainly on the reading experience since one of the main claims of the thesis is that literary narrative fictions are co-products of the author and the reader. In that sense the aforementioned impact cannot be understood without taking into account the creative acts of the reader. The exploration is carried out by focusing on three scholars whose investigations on the problem of literary (...) experience can be read as complementary works. In the first chapter I descriptively lay out Roman Ingarden’s investigation on the ontological and structural character of the literary work of art along with his phenomenological inquiry into the cognition of this work. By examining his basic claims about the nature of the literary work of art and its cognition, I discuss the ontological incompleteness of these works which necessitates the active role of the reader in giving the work its final shape. In the second chapter I focus upon Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory. Iser’s theory goes parallel to Ingarden’s in the sense that they both accept the openness of the work to the creative acts of the reader. Iser, however by his notions of depragmatization, negation and negativity suggest us a two-way traffic between the fictional work and the reader. Through the reading proses, by virtue of the negations and de-pragmatizations, the work invites the reader to reflect on the familiar norms it represents and suggest to her a new model to understand the real world. In this way, while giving a shape to the work, the reader is also shaped by it. The third chapter addresses the phenomenological hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. By exploring his notion of “narrative identity” as a mediator between the ipse and idem identities, my aim is to show the influence of the literary fictional narratives in understanding the identity of the individual subject as a temporal, historical, and intersubjective being. It is only through this understanding that we can construe the subject in her ethical identity. I will also focus on Ricoeur’s notions of “emplotment,” and “threefold mimesis,” which implies the active role of the reader in realizing the literary narrative fiction, so that I can reveal how fictional narratives enhance the notion of narrative identity. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In public debates there are occasions on which persons might feel obligated to show disrespect in order to preserve integrity. In some public discourses interlocutors often show disrespect by “writing off” one another's reasons in an attempt to defend and preserve their own particular beliefs. To make better sense of the apparent discomfiture of intuitions concerning the connections between respect and integrity in such public confrontations, an “other-words orientation” to communication is proposed. The other-words orientation requires that individuals “stand (...) for something” but in a way that respects one's opposition as the living, breathing, reason-giving entities they are. The ancient art of double argument is central to this endeavor. (shrink)

But that which remains the poets have founded.In contemporary rhetorical theory, the relationship between rhetoric and art tends to be articulated in terms of aesthetics. This increasingly popular discourse on “aesthetic rhetoric,” however, is characterized by a remarkable diversity. The rhetoric of fiction, poetry, and other literary genres, for example, has been explored in these terms (e.g., Booth 1983), as has the rhetoric of film (Haskins 2003), photography (Hariman and Lucaites 2007), and even natural landscapes (Clark 2004). From a different (...) perspective, aesthetics has been distilled to a range of “features” or “elements” that a given text is said to possess. Nathan Crick and Jeremy Engels, for example .. (shrink)

This article addresses issues in the philosophy of fiction from the perspective of a relevance theoretic approach to communication: first, how should we understand the notion of ‘voice’ as it is used in the analysis of free indirect style narratives; and, second, in what sense can the person responsible for free indirect representations of fictional characters' thoughts be regarded as a communicator? The background to these questions is the debate about the roles of pretence and attribution in free indirect style. (...) I argue that the role of expressives in sustaining the illusion that fictional characters speak their inner thoughts suggests that ‘voice’ should be understood in two distinct ways. On the one hand, there are cases in which the use of expressive devices leads to the formation of thoughts which are understood to resemble other (attributed) thoughts. On the other hand, there are other cases in which expressives are used as a means of simulating a fictional character's behaviour or style. At the same time, I argue that in order to accommodate free indirect thought representation in a relevance theoretic model of communication, the responsibility for ensuring that the effort of processing the text will be rewarded by optimal relevance must be decoupled from the point of view that is being represented. While the (constructed) author is responsible for orchestrating our interpretation of free indirect thought representations so that the effort of processing will result in optimal relevance, the reader does not necessarily assume this function is being performed by someone who intends to communicate their own thoughts: the relevance of the act of narration may instead lie in the sense of mutuality achieved between reader and character. (shrink)

I take a pragmatic approach to what interpreters do when they interpret and argue that critical pluralists have focused almost exclusively on one aspect of interpretation: the fact that it is an event taking place in a historical and cultural milieu that influences the many ways interpreters approach a given text. However, there is also in interpretation a pragmatic aspect: the fact that it is an act performed by individuals who, through the utterance of their statements, implicitly make claims, for (...) example, regarding the truth of their interpretation. In the first part I explain what critical pluralists overlook and the consequences of such oversight. In the second part I indicate how the validity of interpretation can be assessed. (shrink)

(1995). Innovation and change in the production of knowledge. Social Epistemology: Vol. 9, Knowledge (EX) Change, pp. 211-232. doi: 10.1080/02691729508578789.