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  1. Experimental Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics.Elzė Sigutė Mikalonytė, Ryan Doran & Shen-yi Liao - 2024 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Experimental philosophy of art and aesthetics is the application of the methods of experimental philosophy to questions about art and aesthetics. By taking a scientific approach to experiences with art and aesthetic phenomena, it is continuous with the longstanding research program in psychology called empirical aesthetics. However, it is also continuous with traditional research in philosophy of art and aesthetics because it is centered on many of the same timeless questions. Like other branches of experimental philosophy, such as experimental moral (...)
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  • Racist Monuments: The Beauty is the Beast.Ten-Herng Lai - forthcoming - The Journal of Ethics:1-21.
    While much has been said about what ought to be done about the statues and monuments of racist, colonial, and oppressive figures, a significantly undertheorised aspect of the debate is the aesthetics of commemorations. I believe that this philosophical oversight is rather unfortunate. I contend that taking the aesthetic value of commemorations seriously can help us a) better understand how and the extent to which objectionable commemorations are objectionable, b) properly formulate responses to aesthetic defences of objectionable commemorations, and c) (...)
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  • Remembering is an Imaginative Project.Seth Goldwasser - 2024 - Philosophical Studies:1-37.
    This essay defends the claim that episodic remembering is a mental action by arguing that episodic remembering and sensory- or experience-like imagining are of a kind in a way relevant for agency. Episodic remembering is a type of imaginative project that involves the agential construction of imagistic-content and that aims at (veridically) representing particular events of the personal past. Neurally intact adults under normal conditions can token experiential memories of particular events from the personal past (merely) by intending or trying (...)
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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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  • ‘Empathy and the boundaries of interpersonal understanding’ – introduction.Katharina Anna Sodoma, Elizabeth Ventham & Christiana Werner - 2024 - Philosophical Explorations 27 (2):123-127.
    One of the reasons why empathy is a topic of enduring interest is the role it can play in understanding others. Empathy can help us to predict each other’s future actions and explain past ones; to...
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  • Ludic resistance: a new solution to the gamer’s paradox.Louis Rouillé - 2024 - Ethics and Information Technology 26 (2):1-11.
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  • Conceptual Baggage and How to Unpack It.Emilia L. Wilson - 2024 - Dissertation, University of St Andrews
    Our interpretive resources enable us to make sense of, navigate, and communicate about our shared world. These resources not only carve the world up into categories, but also guide how we, individually and collectively, are oriented towards it. In this thesis, I examine how these resources, and the dispositions they guide, may be harmful. A vital kind of interpretive resources are frames, which equip us with unified perspectives on the world. Perspectives are suites of open-ended interpretive (inquisitive, attentional, inferential, evaluative, (...)
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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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  • Fiction as a defeater.Andreas Stokke - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    This paper argues that no instances of acquiring knowledge from works of literary fiction are instances of the way we ordinarily learn from the testimony of others. The paper argues that the fictional status of a work is a defeater for the justification of beliefs formed on the basis of statements within that work, which must itself be defeated for such beliefs based on fiction to amount to knowledge. This marks a fundamental difference with learning from testimony, since regardless of (...)
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  • Hume and Kant on imaginative resistance.Emine Hande Tuna - 2024 - European Journal of Philosophy 32 (2):342-352.
    The topic of imaginative resistance attracted considerable philosophical attention in recent years. Yet, with a few exceptions, no historical investigation of the phenomenon has been carried out. This paper amends this gap in the literature by constructing a Humean and a Kantian explanation. The main contributions of this historical analysis to this debate are to make room for emotions in explanations of resistance reactions and to upset the polarization between rival accounts by suggesting that our possible responses to morally flawed (...)
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  • Fictional Reality.Kyle Blumberg & Ben Holguín - forthcoming - Philosophical Review.
    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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  • On the difference between the ‘In’ and ‘According to’ operators.Merel Semeijn - 2023 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (2):239-264.
    Semanticists and philosophers of fiction that formulate analyses of reports on the content of media—or ‘contensive statements’—of the form ‘In/According to _s_, \(\phi \) ’, usually treat the ‘In _s_’-operator (_In_) and the ‘According to _s_’-operator (_Acc_) on a par. I argue that _In_ and _Acc_ require separate semantic analyses based on three clusters of linguistic observations: (1) preferences for _In_ or _Acc_ in contensive statements about fictional or non-fictional media, (2) preferences for _In_ or _Acc_ in contensive statements about (...)
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  • Moral Responsibility, the Author, and the Ethical Criticism of Art.Zhen Li - 2023 - Philosophia 51 (5):2479-2496.
    In this paper, I argue that since artworks cannot take moral responsibility, it is impossible to establish any sort of ethical criticism towards them for their own sake. Ethical criticism of art is inevitably directed at the artist(s), who can take moral responsibility for creating or performing the art in certain ways. Therefore, we should distinguish between two types of criticism towards art: (1) the ethical criticism should be contextualized within the author-work framework, meaning that the extent to which the (...)
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  • Is imagining impossibilities impossible?William Bondi Knowles - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    According to what Hume termed an ‘establish’d maxim’, nothing absolutely impossible is imaginable. It has recently been claimed against this that given the ubiquity of stipulative imagination, where one imagines a proposition simply by adding it as a stipulation about the imagined situation, it seems that we can imagine any impossibility whatsoever, even plain contradictions: all we need to do is add them as stipulations. The aim of this article is both to defend Hume’s maxim against this objection and – (...)
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  • Crossing the Fictional Line: Moral Graveness, the Gamer’s Dilemma, and the Paradox of Fictionally Going Too Far.Thomas Montefiore & Paul Formosa - 2023 - Philosophy and Technology 36 (3):1-21.
    The Gamer’s Dilemma refers to the philosophical challenge of justifying the intuitive difference people seem to see between the moral permissibility of enacting virtual murder and the moral impermissibility of enacting virtual child molestation in video games (Luck Ethics and Information Technology, 1:31, 2009). Recently, Luck in Philosophia, 50:1287–1308, 2022 has argued that the Gamer’s Dilemma is actually an instance of a more general “paradox”, which he calls the “paradox of treating wrongdoing lightly”, and he proposes a graveness resolution to (...)
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  • Why We Need Imagination.Amy Kind - 2023 - In Brian McLaughlin & Jonathan Cohen (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind, 2nd edition. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 570-587.
    Traditionally, imagination has been considered to be a primitive mental state type (or group of types), irreducible to other mental state types. In particular, it has been thought to be distinct from other mental states such as belief, perception, and memory, among others. Recently, however, the category of imagination has come under attack, with challenges emerging from a multitude of different directions. Some philosophers have argued that we should not recognize belief and imagination as distinct states but rather on a (...)
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  • The philosophy of the metaverse.Melvin Chen - 2023 - Ethics and Information Technology 25 (3):1-13.
    How might we philosophize about the metaverse? It is traditionally held that the four main branches of philosophy are metaphysics, epistemology, axiology, and logic. In this article, I shall demonstrate how virtual walt-fictionalism, a particular version of virtual irrealism, is able to offer a straightforward, internally consistent, and powerful response about the metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology (ethics) of the metaverse. I will first characterize the metaverse in terms of a reality-virtuality (RV) continuum and distinguish between virtual realism and virtual irrealism, (...)
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  • (1 other version)On the Ethics of Imagination and Ethical-Aesthetic Value Interaction in Fiction.Adriana Clavel-Vázquez - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9.
    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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  • References.John Bengson & Marc A. Moffett - 2011 - In John Bengson & Marc A. Moffett (eds.), Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press USA. pp. 361-386.
    This compilation of references includes all references for the knowledge-how chapters included in Bengson & Moffett's edited volume. The volume and the compilation of references may serve as a good starting point for people who are unfamiliar with the philosophical literature on knowledge-how.
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  • Telling the Stories of Others.Nadia Mehdi - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9.
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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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  • Fictions that Purport to Tell the Truth.Neri Marsili - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (2):509-531.
    Can fictions make genuine assertions about the actual world? Proponents of the ‘Assertion View’ answer the question affirmatively: they hold that authors can assert, by means of explicit statements that are part of the work of fiction, that something is actually the case in the real world. The ‘Nonassertion’ View firmly denies this possibility. In this paper, I defend a nuanced version of the Nonassertion View. I argue that even if fictions cannot assert, they can indirectly communicate that what is (...)
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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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  • (1 other version)Experimental philosophy of aesthetics.Florian Cova - 2023 - In Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser (eds.), The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter.
    In this chapter, I present a comprehensive review of the literature on experimental philosophy of aesthetics.
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  • Imagination in science.Alice Murphy - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (6):e12836.
    While discussions of the imagination have been limited in philosophy of science, this is beginning to change. In recent years, a vast literature on imagination in science has emerged. This paper surveys the current field, including the changing attitudes towards the scientific imagination, the fiction view of models, how the imagination can lead to knowledge and understanding, and the value of different types of imagination. It ends with a discussion of the gaps in the current literature, indicating avenues for future (...)
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  • Structures of Morality and Allegiance in the Character Arc Story.Rory Kelly & Samuel Cumming - 2022 - British Journal of Aesthetics 62 (4):687-698.
    The view that allegiance to characters is a matter of general moral assessment, as developed by Carroll (1984) and Smith (1995), has the resources to respond to counterexamples proposed in the literature, including appeals to anti-heroes, rough heroes and other ‘reprehensible characters’ that garner our allegiance. It can even admit non-moral factors as subterranean influences on moral assessment. Nevertheless, the view requires that the characters we most favour are those with the highest moral standing, and this does not seem to (...)
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  • Learning Implicit Biases from Fiction.Kris Goffin & Stacie Friend - 2022 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80 (2):129-139.
    Philosophers and psychologists have argued that fiction can ethically educate us: fiction supposedly can make us better people. This view has been contested. It is, however, rarely argued that fiction can morally “corrupt” us. In this article, we focus on the alleged power of fiction to decrease one's prejudices and biases. We argue that if fiction has the power to change prejudices and biases for the better, then it can also have the opposite effect. We further argue that fictions are (...)
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  • Counterfactual Reasoning in Art Criticism.Angela Sun - 2022 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80 (3):276-285.
    When we evaluate artworks, we often point to what an artist could have done or what a work could have been in order to say something about the work as it actually is. Call this counterfactual reasoning in art criticism. On my account, counterfactual claims about artworks involve comparative aesthetic judgments between actual artworks and hypothetical variations of those works. The practice of imagining what an artwork could have been is critically useful because it can help us understand how artworks (...)
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  • Longings in Limbo: A New Defence of I-Desires.Luke Roelofs - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (8):3331-3355.
    This paper responds to two arguments that have been offered against the positing of ‘i-desires’, imaginative counterparts of desire supposedly involved in fiction, pretence, and mindreading. The Introspection Argument asks why, if there are both i-desires and desires, the distinction is so unfamiliar and hard to draw, unlike the relatively clear distinctions between perception and mental imagery, or belief and belief-like imagining. The Accountability Argument asks how it can make sense to treat merely imaginative states as revealing of someone’s psychology, (...)
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  • Player Engagement with Games: Formal Reliefs and Representation Checks.Karl Egerton - 2022 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80 (1):95-104.
    Alongside the direct parallels and contrasts between traditional narrative fiction and games, there lie certain partial analogies that provide their own insights. This article begins by examining a direct parallel between narrative fiction and games—the role of fictional reliefs and reality checks in shaping aesthetic engagement—before arguing that from this a partial analogy can be developed stemming from a feature that distinguishes most games from most traditional fictions: the presence of rules. The relation between rules and fiction in games has (...)
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  • The Fourfold Route to Empirical Enlightenment: Experimental Philosophy’s Adolescence and the Changing Body of Work.Robert Barnard, Joseph Ulatowski & Jonathan M. Weinberg - 2021 - Filozofia Nauki 29 (2):77-113.
    The time has come to consider whether experimental philosophy’s (“x-phi”) early arguments, debates, and conceptual frameworks, that may have worn well in its early days, fit with the diverse range of projects undertaken by experimental philosophers. Our aim is to propose a novel taxonomy for x-phi that identifies four paths from empirical findings to philosophical consequences, which we call the “fourfold route.” We show how this taxonomy can be fruitfully applied even at what one might have taken to be the (...)
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  • Is there a specific sort of knowledge from fictional works?María José Alcaraz León - 2016 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 35 (3):21-46.
    Reflection on the nature and value of fiction has often paid attention to the possibility of acquiring knowledge through engaging with fictional works. The alleged imaginative character of fiction appreciation and the sort of emotional responses that fiction is able to prompt in the viewer have been frequently invoked in order to explain the peculiar cognitive value that fictions may possess. In this paper, I would like to question whether fiction as such possesses a specific kind of value. Although I (...)
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  • Questioning Imaginative Resistance and Resistant Reading.Bradford Skow - 2021 - British Journal of Aesthetics 61 (4):575-587.
    It is widely accepted that readers will resist imagining that a character in a story did something morally wrong, even if the story endorses this judgement. This paper argues, first, that readers will not resist if the question of whether that act was wrong is not salient as they read; and, second, that asking a certain question can be part of correctly appreciating a story—even if that question is not in the foreground of the story, and even if the story (...)
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  • How to keep up good appearances: Desire, imagination, and the good.Uku Tooming - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 30 (3):1147-1160.
    It is not uncommon to think that having a desire involves taking its object to be good in some sense. This idea has been developed in two directions: either toward a view that understands the positive evaluation in terms of a judgment or belief or a view according to which the relevant evaluation is perception-like. In this article, I defend a novel proposal that takes the positive evaluation of the object of desire to be a kind of imagining.
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  • Free Indirect Discourse in Non-Fiction.Andreas Stokke - 2021 - Frontiers in Communication 5 (606616).
    This paper considers some uses of Free Indirect Discourse within non-fictional discourse. It is shown that these differ from ordinary uses in that they do not attribute actual thoughts or utterances. I argue that the explanation for this is that these uses of Free Indirect Discourse are not assertoric. Instead, it is argued here that they are fictional uses, that is, they are used with fictional force like utterances used to tell a fictional story. Rather than making assertions about the (...)
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  • Can imagination be unconscious?Amy Kind - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):13121-13141.
    Our ordinary conception of imagination takes it to be essentially a conscious phenomenon, and traditionally that’s how it had been treated in the philosophical literature. In fact, this claim had often been taken to be so obvious as not to need any argumentative support. But lately in the philosophical literature on imagination we see increasing support for the view that imagining need not occur consciously. In this paper, I examine the case for unconscious imagination. I’ll consider four different arguments that (...)
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  • The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy.Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser (eds.) - 2023 - Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter.
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  • Ethics and Imagination.Joy Shim & Shen-yi Liao - 2023 - In James Harold (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Art. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 709-727.
    In this chapter, we identify and present predominant debates at the intersection of ethics and imagination. We begin by examining issues on whether our imagination can be constrained by ethical considerations, such as the moral evaluation of imagination, the potential for morality’s constraining our imaginative abilities, and the possibility of moral norms’ governing our imaginings. Then, we present accounts that posit imagination’s integral role in cultivating ethical lives, both through engagements with narrative artworks and in reality. Our final topic of (...)
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  • Emotion in imaginative resistance.Dylan Campbell, William Kidder, Jason D’Cruz & Brendan Gaesser - 2021 - Philosophical Psychology 34 (7):895-937.
    Imaginative resistance refers to cases in which one’s otherwise flexible imaginative capacity is constrained by an unwillingness or inability to imaginatively engage with a given claim. In three studies, we explored which specific imaginative demands engender resistance when imagining morally deviant worlds and whether individual differences in emotion predict the degree of this resistance. In Study 1 (N = 176), participants resisted the notion that harmful actions could be morally acceptable in the world of a narrative regardless of the author’s (...)
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  • A Sensibilist Explanation of Imaginative Resistance.Nils Franzén - 2021 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy (3):159-174.
    This article discusses why it is the case that we refuse to accept strange evaluative claims as being true in fictions, even though we are happy to go along with other types of absurdities in such contexts. For instance, we would refuse to accept the following statement as true, even in the con-text of a fiction: -/- (i) In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girl. -/- This article offers a sensibilist diagnosis of (...)
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  • Narrative testimony.Rachel Fraser - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (12):4025-4052.
    Epistemologists of testimony have focused almost exclusively on the epistemic dynamics of simple testimony. We do sometimes testify by ways of simple, single sentence assertions. But much of our testimony is narratively structured. I argue that narrative testimony gives rise to a form of epistemic dependence that is far richer and more far reaching than the epistemic dependence characteristic of simple testimony.
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  • Making imagination even more embodied: imagination, constraint and epistemic relevance.Zuzanna Rucińska & Shaun Gallagher - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):8143-8170.
    This paper considers the epistemic role that embodiment plays in imagining. We focus on two aspects of embodied cognition understood in its strong sense: explicit motoric processes related to performance, and neuronal processes rooted in bodily and action processes, and describe their role in imagining. The paper argues that these two aspects of strongly embodied cognition can play distinctive and positive roles in constraining imagining, thereby complementing Amy Kind's argument for the epistemic relevance of imagination "under constraints" and Magdalena Balcerak (...)
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  • Fiction and importation.Andreas Stokke - 2021 - Linguistics and Philosophy 45 (1):65-89.
    Importation in fictional discourse is the phenomenon by which audiences include information in the story over and above what is explicitly stated by the narrator. This paper argues that importation is distinct from generation, the phenomenon by which truth in fiction may outstrip what is made explicit, and draws a distinction between fictional truth and fictional records. The latter comprises the audience’s picture of what is true according to the narrator. The paper argues that importation into fictional records operates according (...)
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  • Metalinguistic Acts in Fiction.Nellie Wieland - 2021 - In Emar Maier & Andreas Stokke (eds.), The Language of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 301-324.
    This chapter identifies and explains several primary functions of the fictional use of metalinguistic devices and considers some difficult cases. In particular, this chapter argues that when real persons are quoted in a storyworld they are ‘storified’ as near-real fictions. In cases of the misquotation of real persons, near-real fictions and near-real quotations must adequately exploit resemblances between the real and the fictional. This concludes with a discussion of the similarities between fictional and nonfictional uses of metalinguistic acts, and how (...)
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  • (1 other version)Impossible Fictions Part I: Lessons for Fiction.Daniel Nolan - 2000 - Philosophy Compass 16 (2):1-12.
    Impossible fictions are valuable evidence both for a theory of fiction and for theories of meaning, mind and epistemology. This article focuses on what we can learn about fiction from reflecting on impossible fictions. First, different kinds of impossible fiction are considered, and the question of how much fiction is impossible is addressed. What impossible fiction contributes to our understanding of "truth in fiction" and the logic of fiction will be examined. Finally, our understanding of unreliable narrators and unreliable narration (...)
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  • (1 other version)Impossible Fiction Part II: Lessons for Mind, Language and Epistemology.Daniel Nolan - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 16 (2):1-12.
    Abstract Impossible fictions have lessons to teach us about linguistic representation, about mental content and concepts, and about uses of conceivability in epistemology. An adequate theory of impossible fictions may require theories of meaning that can distinguish between different impossibilities; a theory of conceptual truth that allows us to make useful sense of a variety of conceptual falsehoods; and a theory of our understanding of necessity and possibility that permits impossibilities to be conceived. After discussing these questions, strategies for resisting (...)
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  • Imagining fictional contradictions.Michel-Antoine Xhignesse - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):3169-3188.
    It is widely believed, among philosophers of literature, that imagining contradictions is as easy as telling or reading a story with contradictory content. Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight, for instance, concerns a knight who performs many brave deeds, but who does not exist. Anything at all, they argue, can be true in a story, including contradictions and other impossibilia. While most will readily concede that we cannot objectually imagine contradictions, they nevertheless insist that we can propositionally imagine them, and regularly (...)
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  • The Aesthetic Achievement and Cognitive Value of Empathy for Rough Heroes.William Kidder - 2022 - Journal of Value Inquiry 56 (2).
    Modern television is awash in programs that focus on the rough hero, a protagonist that is explicitly depicted as immoral. In this paper I examine why audiences find these characters so compelling, focusing on archetypal rough heroes in two programs: The Sopranos and Breaking Bad. I argue that the ability of rough-hero programs to engender a certain degree of empathy for morally deviant characters despite viewers' resistance to empathizing with these characters' moral views is an aesthetic achievement. In addition, I (...)
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  • Voluntary Imagination: A Fine-Grained Analysis.Ilaria Canavotto, Francesco Berto & Alessandro Giordani - 2020 - Review of Symbolic Logic (2):362-387.
    We study imagination as reality-oriented mental simulation (ROMS): the activity of simulating nonactual scenarios in one’s mind, to investigate what would happen if they were realized. Three connected questions concerning ROMS are: What is the logic, if there is one, of such an activity? How can we gain new knowledge via it? What is voluntary in it and what is not? We address them by building a list of core features of imagination as ROMS, drawing on research in cognitive psychology (...)
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  • Reference in Fiction.Stacie Friend - 2019 - Disputatio 11 (54):179-206.
    Most discussions of proper names in fiction concern the names of fictional characters, such as ‘Clarissa Dalloway’ or ‘Lilliput.’ Less attention has been paid to referring names in fiction, such as ‘Napoleon’ (in Tolstoy’s War and Peace) or ‘London’ (in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four). This is because many philosophers simply assume that such names are unproblematic; they refer in the usual way to their ordinary referents. The alternative position, dubbed Exceptionalism by Manuel García-Carpintero, maintains that referring names make a distinctive semantic (...)
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