To Network or Not to Network

This article contrasts hostility toward visual and literary art in English radical Puritanism before the late seventeenth century with the central role of art for Dutch Mennonites, many involved in the commercial prosperity of Amsterdam. Both 1620s Mennonites and 1650s–1660s Quakers debated the relationship between literal truth of the Bible and claims for the power of a personally felt Holy Spirit. This was the intra-Mennonite “Two-Word Dispute,” and for Quakers an opportunity to attack Puritans who argued that the Bible was literally the Word of God, not the “light within.” Mennonites like Jan Theunisz and Quakers like Samuel Fisher made extensive use of learning, festive subversion and poetry. Texts from the earlier dispute were republished in order to traduce the Quakers when they came to Amsterdam in the 1650s and discovered openness to conversation but not conversion.

Deconstructing Dante: How things fall apart in the Paradiso

Much recent commentary on Dante’s Commedia focuses on Dante’s truth claims in the poem. Indeed, Teodolinda Barolini has proposed that “the fundamental question for all readers of Dante’s poem” is “How are we to respond to the poet’s insistence that he is telling us the truth?” I propose that the poem itself gives us guidance as to the seriousness of its claims to literal truth. It does so by actively deconstructing its own meaning at critical junctures. I look at several such moments of deconstruction, but I argue that the first few cantos of the Paradiso in particular provide a reflection on the difference between reality and fiction. Early in the Paradiso, Dante draws attention to the metaphoric nature of his poem and reminds his reader, through his character’s own actions, that metaphor is not reality. In this way, Dante implies that we should not take the narrative particulars of his poem too literally but should treat metaphor as metaphor rather than as mimesis.

Histories of Fiction

One shared assumption of many recent efforts to delineate a history of fiction (or fictionality, typically understood as a mode of nonliteral reference) is that that term names a conceptual operation, be it intrinsic or culturally learned. This article argues that fiction is merely a particular type of classification, akin but not identical to the classifications performed by terms such as mimesis or verisimilitude. Thus it is nonsensical to claim that fiction qua concept does or does not exist at any given moment: fiction is foremost a way of grouping various literary practices, and it is those practices that emerge over time. The article then recasts the interest in the early novel’s fictionality shown by Catherine Gallagher and others as a problem of practices rather than of concepts. It tracks trends in subject matter and assertions of literal truth through a quantitative diachronic analysis of 230 years of French novels. While these trends cannot by their very nature show the birth of the concept of fiction—which was never born in the first place—they are the type of evidence that should be central to any future history of fiction.

Nonoverlapping Magisteria

There is no conflict between science and religion. Creationism is only a local movement, prevalent only among the few sectors of American Protestantism that read the Bible as an inerrant, literally true document. Creationism based on biblical literalism makes little sense in either Catholicism or Judaism, for neither religion maintains any extensive tradition for reading the Bible as literal truth. The lack of conflict arises from a lack of overlap between the respective domains of professional expertise of science and religion. No conflict should exist because the magisteria of science and religion do not overlap. According to the principle of NOMA — “nonoverlapping magisteria” — science covers the empirical universe, while religion covers questions of moral meaning and ethical value. This principle was obeyed by both Pius XII and John Paul II. They both saw no conflict between Catholic faith and a theory of evolution. However, there is one important difference between their positions. Pius XII admitted evolution as a legitimate hypothesis, but at the same time he proclaimed that the theory of evolution had not been proven and might well be wrong. On the other hand, John Paul II stated that evolution can no longer be doubted. Now, he stated, evolution must be accepted not merely as a plausible possibility but also as an effectively proven fact. This fact is no threat to religion if one accepts the principle of NOMA. As a consequence of this principle, religion can no longer dictate the factual conclusions that belong to the magisterium of science, nor may scientists decide on moral truths.

The Things We Do with Empty Names

This chapter undertakes to apply the previously developed theory of objective representational content to our thought and talk about apparently non-existent objects. It aims to show that we need not construe the referents of singular terms within fiction and within mathematics as possessing bona fide existence (or non-existence) while also providing a robust understanding of our singular representations when we think with such terms. The arguments depend on the trio of distinctions between merely objectual and fully objective linguistic and mental representations; non-veridical and veridical language games; and truth-similitude and literal truth. With these distinctions, the chapter exhibits the explanatory power of a theory on which empty singular terms are merely objectual yet are fundamental to our non-veridical language and thought games, possessing truth-similitude while falling short of literal truth.

Muriel Spark and the Art of Deception: Constructing Plausibility with the Methods of WWII Black Propaganda

From May to October 1944, Muriel Spark was employed by the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), a secret service created by Britain during the Second World War with the mission of spreading propaganda to enemy and enemy-occupied countries. This was a formative experience which allowed her to develop an understanding of literal truth as elusive and historically contingent—even a constructed effect—as well as an interest in fictional fabrication and deception. Drawing on an account of the methods of WWII British black propaganda, Spark’s biographical accounts, and heretofore untapped archival documents from the Political Warfare Executive Papers (National Archives), this essay analyses how Spark employs the fictional equivalent of the methods of WWII black propaganda in order to examine the creation of plausibility in her novels. It explores Spark’s deployment of verifiable facts, evidence, precise information, appropriate tone, narrative coherence, targeting, covert motives, chronological disruption and repetition to construct the key elements of fiction in her novels. I argue that such fictional strategies provide a political and moral antidote to totalitarian thinking by presenting reality as necessarily contingent, and therefore open to external contestation and democratic debate. Bringing together history, biography and literary criticism, this is the first systematic and archivally supported examination of how Spark’s work for the PWE opens up a way of rethinking her fascination with the art of deception.

Conclusion

This brief chapter draws some methodological morals from the preceding arguments. Semantics must beware of what scientists call overfitting the data, complicating the theory to fit data which may be unreliable, a process which tends not to yield equilibrium. One source of unreliability is human reliance on heuristics for assessing sentences, since their truth-value in a context is not epistemically transparent to us. This non-transparency explains why the role of heuristics cannot be reduced to standard Gricean mechanisms in pragmatics, which typically work off literal truth-conditions: but sameness of truth-conditions is not transparent to speakers, and heuristics may treat sentences with the same truth-conditions differently. Semantics needs to take into account the role of heuristics as a distinctive source of error in its (apparent) data

Religion

This chapter critically examines key historical and contemporary justifications for religious literalism. Reasons to believe in the literal truth of certain religious texts are divided into historical and contemporary evidence of miracles, the sensus divinitatis (or sense of God), and cosmological and teleological “proofs” of the existence of God. It finds that literalist religious belief is the product of motivated cognition, and can only be sustained by rationalization and denial. It further investigates ideas about how religious ideology may have originated, as well as how religious literalism can persist in the face of scientific advancements and cosmopolitan knowledge of other cultures.

Speaking figuratively

This article addresses two forms of artful language: similes and metaphors. It argues that their artful quality arises from a deliberate omission of information, requiring the listener to fill in the missing parts. Sentences of the form ‘A is like B’ have two uses: as plain comparisons (called similatives) stating that two individuals (item A and item B) are comparable and share properties, and as similes, which are intended as assertions that A is “B-like” in some way. The simile’s absent information is tacit assumptions about its second member, B. As a result, similatives and similes behave differently and have distinct syntactic interpretations. The absent information in a metaphor of the form ‘A is a B’ is a tacit analogy, A:X::B:Y. As such, a metaphor asserts a parallel between two unstated relations, not its two identified items. The tacit members X and Y create the structural framework for the metaphor. Because metaphors use different tacit information than similes do, the two forms require distinct interpretations. It is also shown here that the literal truth of similes and metaphors is irrelevant to their interpretations. Nevertheless, artful statements can be used to make true or false assertions. Their truth is determined by taking their absent information into account. Furthermore, similes and metaphors can meaningfully use negation, as plain statements can. Patterns in simile and metaphor usage reveal that there are predictable processes behind their creation and systematic methods to their interpretations. Once these are identified, the linguistic contributions of similes and metaphors become clear.

Slurs, Assertion, and Predication

A multidimensional account of the meanings of slurs holds that a slur has both literal, truth-conditional content (which is neutral) and conventional implicature (which is derogatory). This chapter offers a careful examination of the motivations and commitments for a multidimensional account and argues that the theoretic costs for such a view are prohibitive. One of the primary motivations for a multidimensional account over a purely truth-conditional account is the apparent wide-scoping phenomenon of slurs (e.g., that derogatory content does not seem cancellable under negation). The chapter argues that carefully distinguishing between predication and assertion not only dispels the misconception that the phenomena in question is centrally about scope but also vindicates the purely truth-conditional account as a more general and unified explanation.