Analytic aesthetics has had little to say about academic schools of criticism, such as Freudian, Marxist, feminist, or postcolonial perspectives. Historicists typically view their interpretations as anachronistic; non-historicists assess all interpretations according to formalist criteria. Insofar as these strategies treat these interpretations as on a par, however, they are inadequate. For the theories that ground the interpretations differ in the claims they make about the world. I argue that the interpretations of different critical schools can be evaluated according to the (...) truth or epistemic merit of these claims. (shrink)

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 (...) claim that this proposal captures the intuitions motivating alternative theories of fiction. (shrink)

The last twenty‐five years have seen a radical shift in the work of politically committed artists. No longer content to merely represent social reality, a new generation of artists has sought to change it, blending art with activism, social regeneration projects, and even violent political action. I assess how this form of contemporary art should lead us to rethink theories of artistic value and argue that these works make a convincing case for an often‐dismissed position, namely, the pragmatic view of (...) artistic value. However, the pragmatic view, when properly applied, sets the bar high indeed—art that tries to change society should be considered good art only when it succeeds in making a tangible difference. (shrink)

Works of art can be difficult in several ways. One important way is by making us face up to unsettling truths. Such works typically receive praise. I maintain, however, that sometimes they deserve moral censure. The crux of my argument is that, just as we have a right to know the truth in certain contexts, so too we have a right not to know it. Provided our ignorance does not harm or seriously endanger others, the decision about whether to know (...) the truth ought to be left to us. Within this limit, therefore, difficult art is morally problematic if it intentionally targets those who have chosen not to know. To illustrate the problem, I discuss the literary writings of Søren Kierkegaard, which aim to deceive readers into seeing unpleasant truths about themselves that they seek to ignore. (shrink)

ABSTRACTI propose a different account of fictional objects from the ones already present in the literature. According to my account, fictional objects are culturally created abstract objects dependent for their existence on the pretence attitude adopted by a group of people towards a single fictional content. My work is divided into three parts: in the first one, I present how fictional objects come into existence according to my proposal; in the second part, I illustrate how the existence of fictional objects (...) so conceived may be ontically indeterminate; in the last part, I consider what happens when vague existence and indeterminate identity are claimed within fictional texts. (shrink)

Against standard descriptivist and referentialist semantics for fictional reports, I will defend a view according to which fictional names do not refer yet they can be distinguished from one another in virtue of their different name-using practices. The logical structures of sentences containing fictional names inherit these distinctions. Different interpretations follow.

The nonexistence of fictional entities does not seem incompatible with their possible existence. The aim of this paper is to give an account of the intuitive truth of statements of possible existence involving fictional proper names in an actualist framework. After having clarified the opposition between a possibilist and an actualist approach of possible wolds, I distinguish fictional individuals from fictional characters and the fictional use of fictional proper names from their metafictional use. On that basis, statements of possible existence (...) involving fictional proper names literally say of fictional characters conceived as abstract objects that they might have been exemplified. (shrink)

During the last decades, there has been a debate on the question whether literary works are utterances, or have utterance meaning, and whether it is reasonable to approach them as such. Proponents of the utterance model in literary interpretation, whom I will refer to as “utterance theorists”, such as Noël Carroll and especially Robert Stecker, suggest that because of their nature as linguistic products of intentional human action, literary works are utterances similar to those used in everyday discourse. Conversely, those (...) whom I will refer to as “appreciation theorists”, such as Stein Haugom Olsen and Peter Lamarque, argue that literary works are by no means comparable to conversational utterances, and treating them in terms of utterances mistakenly dismisses their literary features. The aim of this article is twofold: to defend a central aspect of the utterance theory and to reconcile the two main positions about central issues in the debate on the meaning of literary works. On the one hand, I shall argue that it is both legitimate and reasonable to discuss the utterance meaning of a literary work on the basis of an interpretative approach interested in the author's “message”. My aim is to show that literary works should be considered utterances in a conversational approach which aims at examining the illocutionary actions conveyed through the work. On the other hand, I attempt both to show that there are various legitimate interpretative approaches which are governed by the interpreter's purposes, and to suggest that the debate between utterance theorists and appreciation theorists is actually about merely different emphases. (shrink)

Coherence is a term of art in both epistemology and literary criticism, and in both contexts judgments of coherence carry evaluative significance. However, whereas the epistemic use of the term picks out a property of belief sets, the literary use can pick out properties of various elements of a literary work, including its plot, characters, and style. For this reason, some have claimed that literary critics are not concerned with the same concept of coherence as epistemologists. In this article I (...) argue against this claim. Although various nonepistemic notions of coherence figure in literary criticism, the epistemic concept has a mirror image in the literary–critical concept of thematic coherence. Moreover, evidence from literary criticism suggests that thematic coherence can be valuable from a literary-evaluative standpoint because it can be valuable from an epistemic standpoint, in particular by enhancing the credibility of a work's themes or author. My analysis of the notion of thematic coherence thus provides novel support for literary cognitivism, the view that a work's literary-aesthetic merits can depend on its epistemic merits. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDer vorliegende Beitrag erläutert anhand ausgewählter Beispiele das Potential von Dystopien für die Bioethik. Hierfür werden bestehende Ansätze narrativer Ethik kritisch rekonstruiert und erweitert. Mittels eines Theorieangebots aus der Literaturwissenschaft wird vorgeschlagen, moralische Überzeugungen, die Dystopien motivieren, in kohärentistische Reflexions- und Begründungsverfahren einzubeziehen. Weiterhin wird systematisch herausgearbeitet, welches Potential Dystopien durch sozio-kulturell dichte Szenarien, einen zeitgeschichtlichen Kontext und durch eine Sensibilisierung für die moralische Relevanz der Sprache für die bioethische Forschung bieten. Die dargestellten methodologischen Überlegungen bieten zum einen praktische Bezugspunkte (...) für didaktische Ansätze und zum anderen für die öffentliche Deliberation. Die Analyse zeigt jedoch auch, dass Dystopien jenseits einer Illustration oder Warnung eigene moralische Positionen zur Diskussion stellen. (shrink)

There are two broad opposing classes of attitudes to reality with corresponding attitudes to knowledge. I argue that these attitudes can be compatible, and that quantum theory requires us to adopt both of them.