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The Nature of Fiction

Cambridge University Press (1990)

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  1. Futher reflections on semantic minimalism: Reply to Wedgwood.Alessandro Capone - 2013 - In Alessandro Capone, Franco Lo Piparo & Marco Carapezza (eds.), Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy. Cham: Springer. pp. 437-474..
    semantic minimalism and moderte contextualism.
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  • Scientific fictions as rules of inference.Mauricio Suárez - 2008 - In Fictions in Science: Philosophical Essays on Modeling and Idealization. New York: Routledge. pp. 158--178.
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  • Thoughtful Brutes.Tomas Hribek - 2012 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 19:70-82.
    Donald Davidson and John Searle famously differ, among other things, on the issue of animal thoughts. Davidson seems to be a latter-day Cartesian, denying any propositional thought to subhuman animals, while Searle seems to follow Hume in claiming that if we have thoughts, then animals do, too. Davidson’s argument centers on the idea that language is necessary for thought, which Searle rejects. The paper argues two things. Firstly, Searle eventually argues that much of a more complex thought does depend on (...)
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  • Educating the design stance: Issues of coherence and transgression.Norman H. Freeman & Melissa L. Allen - 2013 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (2):141 - 142.
    Bullot & Reber (B&R) put forth a design stance to fuse psychological and art historical accounts of visual thinking into a single theory. We argue that this aspect of their proposal needs further fine-tuning. Issues of transgression and coherence are necessary to provide stability to the design stance. We advocate looking to Art Education for such fundamentals of picture understanding.
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  • Does the Paradox of Fiction Exist?Katherine Tullmann & Wesley Buckwalter - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (4):779-796.
    Many philosophers have attempted to provide a solution to the paradox of fiction, a triad of sentences that lead to the conclusion that genuine emotional responses to fiction are irrational. We suggest that disagreement over the best response to this paradox stems directly from the formulation of the paradox itself. Our main goal is to show that there is an ambiguity regarding the word ‘exist’ throughout the premises of the paradox. To reveal this ambiguity, we display the diverse existential commitments (...)
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  • Imagining and Fiction: Some Issues.Kathleen Stock - 2013 - Philosophy Compass 8 (10):887-896.
    In this paper, I survey in some depth three issues arising from the connection between imagination and fiction: (i) whether fiction can be defined as such in terms of its prescribing imagining; (ii) whether imagining in response to fiction is de se, or de re, or both; (iii) the phenomenon of ‘imaginative resistance’ and various explanations for it. Along the way I survey, more briefly, several other prominent issues in this area too.
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  • Expression in the Representational Arts.Catharine Abell - 2013 - American Philosophical Quarterly 50 (1):23-36.
    Understanding a work of representational art involves more than simply grasping what it represents. We can distinguish at least three types of content that representational works may possess. First, all representational works have explicit representational content. This includes the literal content of a linguistic work and the depictive content of a pictorial work. Second, they often have a conveyed content, which outstrips their explicit representational content, including much that is merely implicit in the work, and may exclude certain aspects of (...)
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  • Fictional Entities.Fiora Salis - 2013 - Online Companion to Problems in Analytic Philosophy.
    In this entry I present one of the most hotly debated issues in contemporary analytic philosophy regarding the nature of fictional entities and the motivations that might be adduced for and against positing them into our ontology. The entry is divided in two parts. In the first part I offer an overview of the main accounts of the metaphysics of fictional entities according to three standard realist views, fictional Meinongianism, fictional possibilism and fictional creationism. In the second part I describe (...)
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  • What's So Bad about Blackface?Christy Mag Uidhir - 2013 - In Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo & Dan Flory (eds.), Race, Philosophy, and Film. New York: Routledge. pp. 51-68.
    I argue that what’s so bad (qua film fiction) about the cinematic practice of actor-character race-mismatching—be it the historically infamous and intuitively repugnant practice of blackface or one of its more contemporary kin—is that the extent to which film-fictions employ such practices is typically the extent to which such film-fictions unrealistically depict facts about race. More precisely, I claim that race-mismatching film fictions—understood as a species of unrealistic fiction—are prima facie inconsistent fictions with the capacity to mislead their audiences about (...)
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  • Modal Fictionalism, Possible Worlds, and Artificiality.Andrea Sauchelli - 2013 - Acta Analytica 28 (4):411-21.
    Accounts of modality in terms of fictional possible worlds face an objection based on the idea that when modal claims are analysed in terms of fictions, the connection between analysans and analysandum seems artificial. Strong modal fictionalism, the theory according to which modal claims are analysed in terms of a fiction, has been defended by, among others, Seahwa Kim, who has recently claimed that the philosophical objection that the connection between modality and fictions is artificial can be met. I propose (...)
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  • Fiction as a Genre.Stacie Friend - 2012 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 112 (2pt2):179--209.
    Standard theories define fiction in terms of an invited response of imagining or make-believe. I argue that these theories are not only subject to numerous counterexamples, they also fail to explain why classification matters to our understanding and evaluation of works of fiction as well as non-fiction. I propose instead that we construe fiction and non-fiction as genres: categories whose membership is determined by a cluster of nonessential criteria, and which play a role in the appreciation of particular works. I (...)
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  • Moral Persuasion and the Diversity of Fictions.Shen-yi Liao - 2013 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 94 (3):269-289.
    Narrative representations can change our moral actions and thoughts, for better or for worse. In this article, I develop a theory of fictions' capacity for moral education and moral corruption that is fully sensitive to the diversity of fictions. Specifically, I argue that the way a fiction influences our moral actions and thoughts importantly depends on its genre. This theory promises new insights into practical ethical debates over pornography and media violence.
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  • Philosophical Problems in Robotics.Yasuo Nakayama - 2011 - Kagaku Tetsugaku 44 (2):2_1-2_16.
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  • Truth in Fiction.Richard Woodward - 2011 - Philosophy Compass 6 (3):158-167.
    When we engage with a work of fiction we gain knowledge about what is fictionally true in that work. Our grasp of what is true in a fiction is central to our engagement with representational works of art, and to our assessments of their merits. Of course, it is sometimes difficult to determine what is fictional – it is a good question whether the main character of American Psycho is genuinely psychotic or merely delusional, for instance. (And even in this (...)
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  • Truth in Fiction.Franck Lihoreau (ed.) - 2010 - Ontos Verlag.
    The essays collected in this volume are all concerned with the connection between fiction and truth. This question is of utmost importance to metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophical logic and epistemology, raising in each of these areas and at their intersections a large number of issues related to creation, existence, reference, identity, modality, belief, assertion, imagination, pretense, etc. All these topics and many more are addressed in this collection, which brings together original essays written from various points of view by (...)
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  • Rationalism and the Content of Intuitive Judgements.Anna-Sara Malmgren - 2011 - Mind 120 (478):263-327.
    It is commonly held that our intuitive judgements about imaginary problem cases are justified a priori, if and when they are justified at all. In this paper I defend this view — ‘rationalism’ — against a recent objection by Timothy Williamson. I argue that his objection fails on multiple grounds, but the reasons why it fails are instructive. Williamson argues from a claim about the semantics of intuitive judgements, to a claim about their psychological underpinnings, to the denial of rationalism. (...)
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  • Review of Mohan Matthen-Seeing, Doing, and Knowing: A Philosophical Theory of Sense Perception. [REVIEW]Dustin Stokes - 2006 - British Journal of Aesthetics 46 (3):323-325.
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  • Fate, Fiction and the Future.Robin Le Poidevin - 2001 - Philosophical Papers 30 (1):69-92.
    Abstract Some fictions, it seems, represent the future as closed, in the sense that some future-tensed propositions are true in those fictions. Yet it is surprisingly difficult to accommodate this plausible thesis within an account of truth in fiction. A number of putative examples of closed fictional futures are discussed (Macbeth, Oedipus, Time and the Conways, The Time Machine) and the problems encountered in reconciling them with various accounts of truth in fiction (David Lewis', Gregory Currie's, Alex Byrne's) elaborated. Connections (...)
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  • Abstract Artifacts in Pretence.Sarah Sawyer - 2002 - Philosophical Papers 31 (2):183-198.
    Abstract In this paper I criticise a recent account of fictional discourse proposed by Nathan Salmon. Salmon invokes abstract artifacts as the referents of fictional names in both object- and meta-fictional discourse alike. He then invokes a theory of pretence to forge the requisite connection between object-fictional sentences and meta-fictional sentences, in virtue of which the latter can be assigned appropriate truth-values. I argue that Salmon's account of pretence renders his appeal to abstract artifacts as the referents of fictional names (...)
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  • Getting Carried Away: Evaluating the Emotional Influence of Fiction Film.Stacie Friend - 2010 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 34 (1):77-105.
    It is widely taken for granted that fictions, including both literature and film,influence our attitudes toward real people, events, and situations. Philosopherswho defend claims about the cognitive value of fiction view this influence in apositive light, while others worry about the potential moral danger of fiction.Marketers hope that visual and aural references to their products in movies willhave an effect on people’s buying patterns. Psychologists study the persuasiveimpact of media. Educational books and films are created in the hopes of guidingchildren’s (...)
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  • The Puzzle of Imaginative Desire.Amy Kind - 2011 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (3):421-439.
    The puzzle of imaginative desire arises from the difficulty of accounting for the surprising behaviour of desire in imaginative activities such as our engagement with fiction and our games of pretend. Several philosophers have recently attempted to solve this puzzle by introducing a class of novel mental states—what they call desire-like imaginings or i-desires. In this paper, I argue that we should reject the i-desire solution to the puzzle of imaginative desire. The introduction of i-desires is both ontologically profligate and (...)
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  • The great beetle debate: A study in imagining with names.Stacie Friend - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 153 (2):183-211.
    Statements about fictional characters, such as “Gregor Samsa has been changed into a beetle,” pose the problem of how we can say something true (or false) using empty names. I propose an original solution to this problem that construes such utterances as reports of the “prescriptions to imagine” generated by works of fiction. In particular, I argue that we should construe these utterances as specifying, not what we are supposed to imagine—the propositional object of the imagining—but how we are supposed (...)
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  • Modal meinongianism and fiction: The best of three worlds.Francesco Berto - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 152 (3):313-35.
    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 (...)
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  • Canny resemblance.Catharine Abell - 2009 - Philosophical Review 118 (2):183-223.
    Depiction is the form of representation distinctive of figurative paintings, drawings, and photographs. Accounts of depiction attempt to specify the relation something must bear to an object in order to depict it. Resemblance accounts hold that the notion of resemblance is necessary to the specification of this relation. Several difficulties with such analyses have led many philosophers to reject the possibility of an adequate resemblance account of depiction. This essay outlines these difficulties and argues that current resemblance accounts succumb to (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Speaking of fictional characters.Amie L. Thomasson - 2003 - Dialectica 57 (2):205–223.
    The challenge of handling fictional discourse is to find the best way to resolve the apparent inconsistencies in our ways of speaking about fiction. A promising approach is to take at least some such discourse to involve pretense, but does all fictional discourse involve pretense? I will argue that a better, less revisionary, solution is to take internal and fictionalizing discourse to involve pretense, while allowing that in external critical discourse, fictional names are used seriously to refer to fictional characters. (...)
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  • Telling Tales.Antony Eagle - 2007 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 107 (1pt2):125 - 147.
    Utterances within the context of telling fictional tales that appear to be assertions are nevertheless not to be taken at face value. The present paper attempts to explain exactly what such 'pseudo-assertions' are, and how they behave. Many pseudo-assertions can take on multiple roles, both within fictions and in what I call 'participatory criticism' of a fiction, especially when they occur discourse-initially. This fact, taken together with problems for replacement accounts of pseudo-assertion based on the implicit prefixing of an 'in (...)
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  • Review essay.Robert Howell - 1996 - Synthese 109 (3):413-434.
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  • Empty names, fictional names, mythical names.David Braun - 2005 - Noûs 39 (4):596–631.
    John Stuart Mill (1843) thought that proper names denote individuals and do not connote attributes. Contemporary Millians agree, in spirit. We hold that the semantic content of a proper name is simply its referent. We also think that the semantic content of a declarative sentence is a Russellian structured proposition whose constituents are the semantic contents of the sentence’s constituents. This proposition is what the sentence semantically expresses. Therefore, we think that sentences containing proper names semantically express singular propositions, which (...)
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  • Domains of discourse.François Recanati - 1996 - Linguistics and Philosophy 19 (5):445 - 475.
    In the first part of this paper I present a defence of the Austinian semantic approach to incomplete quantifiers and similar phenomena (section 2-4). It is part of my defence of Austinian semantics that it incorporates a cognitive dimension (section 4). This cognitive dimension makes it possible to connect Austinian semantics to various cognitive theories of discourse interpretation. In the second part of the paper (sections 5-7), I establish connections between Austinian semantics and four particular theories: • the theory of (...)
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  • Fictional characters.Stacie Friend - 2007 - Philosophy Compass 2 (2):141–156.
    If there are no fictional characters, how do we explain thought and discourse apparently about them? If there are, what are they like? A growing number of philosophers claim that fictional characters are abstract objects akin to novels or plots. They argue that postulating characters provides the most straightforward explanation of our literary practices as well as a uniform account of discourse and thought about fiction. Anti-realists counter that postulation is neither necessary nor straightforward, and that the invocation of pretense (...)
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  • Fictions, feelings, and emotions.Stuart Brock - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 132 (2):211 - 242.
    Many philosophers suggest (1) that our emotional engagement with fiction involves participation in a game of make-believe, and (2) that what distinguishes an emotional game from a dispassionate game is the fact that the former activity alone involves sensations of physiological and visceral disturbances caused by our participation in the game. In this paper I argue that philosophers who accept (1) should reject (2). I then illustrate how this conclusion illuminates various puzzles in aesthetics and the philosophy of mind.
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  • Fictional Contexts.Andrea Bonomi - 2008 - In Paolo Bouquet, Luciano Serafini & Richmond H. Thomason (eds.), Perspectives on Contexts. Center for the Study of Language and Inf. pp. 213–48.
    is accounted for, among other things, in terms of particular relations between events (or states1) and places or times. Roughly speaking, an event α is said to occur in a place p (or interval t) if the spatial (temporal) extension of α is located in p (or t). Let the predicate ‘Occ’ denote such a relation. From this point of view, part of the content of the above sentences can be associated, respectively, with formulas such as.
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  • That’s Beyond My Imagination!Kiyohiro Sen - 2024 - Contemporary Aesthetics 22.
    According to one strongly supported view, fiction is a functional kind that communicates imaginings. Combining this definitional thesis with a plausible principle concerning functional kinds leads to the following evaluative thesis: features that contribute to communicating imaginings constitute good-making features as fiction, and features that impede this constitute bad-making features as fiction. However, this thesis is at odds with the actual practice of fiction. Critics can show their admiration for complicated works of fiction by stating, “That’s beyond my imagination!” I (...)
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  • Categorizing Art.Kiyohiro Sen - 2024 - Dissertation, University of Tokyo
    This dissertation examines the practice of categorizing works of art and its relationship to art criticism. How a work of art is categorized influences how it is appreciated and criticized. Being frightening is a merit for horror, but a demerit for lullabies. The brushstrokes in Monet's "Impression, Sunrise" (1874) look crude when seen as a Neoclassical painting, but graceful when seen as an Impressionist painting. Many of the judgments we make about artworks are category-dependent in this way, but previous research (...)
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  • Real Feeling and Fictional Time in Human-AI Interactions.Krueger Joel & Tom Roberts - 2024 - Topoi 43 (3).
    As technology improves, artificial systems are increasingly able to behave in human-like ways: holding a conversation; providing information, advice, and support; or taking on the role of therapist, teacher, or counsellor. This enhanced behavioural complexity, we argue, encourages deeper forms of affective engagement on the part of the human user, with the artificial agent helping to stabilise, subdue, prolong, or intensify a person’s emotional condition. Here, we defend a fictionalist account of human/AI interaction, according to which these encounters involve an (...)
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  • (1 other version)How Does Pornography Change Desires? A Pragmatic Account.Junhyo Lee & Eleonore Neufeld - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    Rae Langton and Caroline West famously argued that pornography operates like a language game, in that it introduces certain views about women into the common ground via presupposition accommodation. While this pragmatic model explains how pornography has the potential to change its viewers’ beliefs, it leaves open how pornography changes people’s desires. Our aim in this paper is to show how Langton and West’s discourse theoretic account of pornography can be refined to close this lacuna. Using tools from recent developments (...)
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  • Fictional Reality.Kyle Blumberg & Ben Holguín - manuscript
    This paper defends a theory of fictional truth. According to this theory, there is a fact of the matter concerning the number of hairs on Sherlock Holmes' head, and likewise for any other meaningful question one could ask about what's true in a work of fiction. We argue that a theory of this form is needed to account for the patterns in our judgments about attitude reports that embed fictional claims. We contrast our view with one of the dominant approaches (...)
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  • How do we regard fictional people? How do they regard us?Meghan M. Salomon-Amend & Lance J. Rips - forthcoming - Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.
    Readers assume that commonplace properties of the real world also hold in realistic fiction. They believe, for example, that the usual physical laws continue to apply. But controversy exists in theories of fiction about whether real individuals exist in the story’s world. Does Queen Victoria exist in the world of Jane Eyre, even though Victoria is not mentioned in it? The experiments we report here find that when participants are prompted to consider the world of a fictional individual (“Consider the (...)
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  • Philosophical Games.Stefano Gualeni - 2022 - The Encyclopedia of Ludic Terms.
    Philosophical games are games designed to invite players to think philosophically within (and about) their gameworlds. They are interactive fictions allowing players to engage with philosophical themes in ways that often set them apart from non-interactive kinds of speculative fictions (such as philosophical novels or thought experiments). To better understand philosophical games, this entry proposes to distinguish two primary ways in which a philosophical game can approach its themes: dialectically or rhetorically.
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  • A Garden of One's Own, or Why Are There No Great Lady Detectives?Shelby Moser & Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2023 - Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 9 (1):1-20.
    Although the character of the “lady detective”is a staple of the cozy mystery genre, we contend that there are no great lady detectives to rival Holmes or Poirot. This is not because there are no clever or interesting lady detective characters, but ratherbecause the concept of greatness is sociallyconstructed and, like coolness, depends on public acclaim and perception. We explore the mechanics of genre formation, arguing that the very structure of cozy mysteries precludes female greatness. To create a “great”character,theauthor cannot (...)
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  • (1 other version)On the Ethics of Imagination and Ethical-Aesthetic Value Interaction in Fiction.Adriana Clavel-Vazquez - forthcoming - Ergo.
    Advocates of interactionism in the ethical criticism of art argue that ethical value impacts aesthetic value. The debate is concerned with “the intrinsic question”: the question of whether ethical flaws/merits in artworks’ manifested attitudes affect their aesthetic value (Gaut 2007: 9). This paper argues that the assumption that artworks have intrinsic ethical value is problematic at least in regards to a significant subset of works: fictional artworks. I argue that, insofar as their ethical value emerges only from attitudes attributable to (...)
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  • The Fictional Character of Scientific Models.Stacie Friend - 2019 - In Arnon Levy & Peter Godfrey-Smith (eds.), The Scientific Imagination. New York, US: Oup Usa. pp. 101-126.
    Many philosophers have drawn parallels between scientific models and fictions. In this paper I will be concerned with a recent version of the analogy, which compares models to the imagined characters of fictional literature. Though versions of the position differ, the shared idea is that modeling essentially involves imagining concrete systems analogously to the way that we imagine characters and events in response to works of fiction. Advocates of this view argue that imagining concrete systems plays an ineliminable role in (...)
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  • The force of fictional discourse.Karl Bergman & Nils Franzen - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6).
    Consider the opening sentence of Tolkien’s The Hobbit: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. By writing this sentence, Tolkien is making a fictional statement. There are two influential views of the nature of such statements. On the pretense view, fictional discourse amounts to pretend assertions. Since the author is not really asserting, but merely pretending, a statement such as Tolkien’s is devoid of illocutionary force altogether. By contrast, on the alternative make-believe view, fictional discourse prescribes that (...)
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  • Truth in interactive fiction.Alex Fisher - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6):1-18.
    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 (...)
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  • Fictional Universal Realism.Jeffrey Goodman - 2022 - Metaphysica 23 (2):177-192.
    Certain realists about properties and relations identify them with universals. Furthermore, some hold that for a wide range of meaningful predicates, the semantic contribution to the propositions expressed by the sentences in which those predicates figure is the universal expressed by the predicate. I here address ontological issues raised by predicates first introduced to us via works of fiction and whether the universal realist should accept that any such predicates express universals. After assessing arguments by Braun, D. and Sawyer, S. (...)
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  • Against the Precisificational Approach to Fictional Inconsistencies.Inchul Yum - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9 (66).
    Fictional realists claim that fictional characters like Spiderman exist in reality. Against this view, Anthony Everett (2005; 2013) argues that fictional realists cannot determine whether characters α and β are identical if the relevant fiction states that α and β are identical and distinct at the same time. Some fictional re-alists, such as Ross Cameron (2013) and Richard Woodward (2017), respond to this objection by saying that the sense in which α and β are identical differs from the sense in (...)
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  • Commentary on Fiction: A Philosophical Analysis, by Catharine Abell; and Apt Imaginings: Feelings for Fictions and Other Creatures of the Mind by Jonathan Gilmore.Gregory Currie - 2022 - British Journal of Aesthetics 62 (2):185-194.
    These two excellent books ask what it is for an audience to engage appropriately with a work of fiction. Catharine Abell argues a radical rethink of foundationa.
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  • Definition of Fiction: State of the Art.David Davies - 2022 - British Journal of Aesthetics 62 (2):241-255.
    In his 2014 book Fiction and Narrative, Derek Matravers mounts a concerted attack on what he terms the ‘post-Walton consensus’ as to the features that distingui.
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  • ‘Truth in Fiction’ Reprised.Manuel García-Carpintero - 2022 - British Journal of Aesthetics 62 (2):307-324.
    The paper surveys recent appraisals of David Lewis’s seminal paper on truth in fiction. It examines variations on standard criticisms of Lewis’s account, aiming to show that, if developed as Lewis suggests in his 1983 Postscript A, his proposals on the topic are—as Hanley puts it—‘as good as it gets’. Thus elaborated, Lewis’s account can resist the objections, and it offers a better picture of fictional discourse than recent resurrections of other classic works of the 1970s by Kripke, van Inwagen (...)
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  • Fiction and Epistemic Value: State of the Art.Mitchell Green - 2022 - British Journal of Aesthetics 62 (2):273-289.
    We critically survey prominent recent scholarship on the question of whether fiction can be a source of epistemic value for those who engage with it fully and appropriately. Such epistemic value might take the form of knowledge (for ‘cognitivists’) or understanding (for ‘neo-cognitivists’). Both camps may be sorted according to a further distinction between views explaining fiction’s epistemic value either in terms of the author’s engaging in a form of telling, or instead via their showing some state of affairs to (...)
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