Extracting fictional truth from unreliable sources

A fictional text is commonly viewed as constituting an invitation to play a certain game of make-believe, with the individual sentences written by the author providing the propositions we are to imagine and/or accept as true within the fiction. However, we can’t always take the text at face value. What narratologists call ‘unreliable narrators’ may present a confused or misleading picture of the fictional world. Meanwhile, there has been a debate in philosophy about ‘imaginative resistance’ in which we resist imagining (or even accepting as true in the fiction) what’s explicitly stated in the text. But if we can’t take the text’s word for it, how do we determine what’s true in a fiction? The chapter proposes an account of fiction interpretation in a dynamic setting (a version of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) with a mechanism for opening, updating, and closing temporary ‘workspaces’) and combines this framework with belief revision logic.

Lecture empathique et trauma de la guerre d’Algérie chez Assia Djebar, Boualem Sansal et Leila Sebbar

This article analyses the narrative processes and literary strategies that seek to engender the reader’s empathy for the main characters in three Francophone texts that depict the trauma of the Algerian War of independence. Each text starts from a real event by intertwining historical facts and the present with fiction, allowing for a better understanding of the postcolonial situation. These expectations are reinforced by Djebar’s and Sansal’s paratexts. Drawing on the theories of Suzanne Keen and Fritz Breithaupt empathy can especially be favoured by internal focalization, the characters’ empathic interpersonal relationships as well as polyphony. The imaginative construction of the other is emphasized as necessary, while the detailed description of historical facts may rather provoke feelings of pity. A fortiori, empathy can decline or be blocked in the passages, which go against the moral convictions of the reader. This imaginative resistance is due to the fact that these passages concern reality and not fiction

A Sensibilist Explanation of Imaginative Resistance

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 context 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 this puzzle, inspired by an observation first made by David Hume. According to sensibilism, the way we feel about things settles their evaluative properties. Thus, when confronted with a fictional scenario where the configuration of non-evaluative facts and properties is relevantly similar to the actual world, we refuse to go along with evaluative properties being instantiated according to a different pattern. It is the attitudes we hold in the actual world that fix the extension of evaluative terms, even in nonactual worlds. When engaging with a fiction, we (to some extent) leave our beliefs about what the world is like behind, while taking our emotional attitudes with us into the fiction. To substantiate this diagnosis, this paper outlines a sensibilist semantics for evaluative terms based on recent discussion regarding predicates of personal taste, and explains how, together with standard assumptions about the nature of fictional discourse, it makes the relevant predictions with respect to engagement with fictions.

Sympathy for the Devil: The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance, the Role of Fiction in Moral Thought, and the Limits of the Imagination

What are the limits of the imagination in morality? What role does fiction play in moral thought? My starting point in addressing these questions is Tamar Szabo Gendler's ‘puzzle of imaginative resistance’, the problem of explaining the special difficulties we seem to encounter in imagining to be right what we take to be morally wrong (or vice versa) in fiction, and Gendler's claim that those difficulties are due to our unwillingness to imagine these things, rather than our inability to imagine what is logically or conceptually impossible. Using a wide range of examples, I argue that there is no puzzle of imaginative resistance and that to think that there is such a puzzle is to miss almost entirely the role fiction plays in moral thought. That, however, does not mean that there are no limits to what we can imagine in morality. In fact, I argue, the imagination is limited in morality, as elsewhere, by what is logically or conceptually possible. Together, those claims suggest that fiction and the imagination play a fundamental role in shaping our conception of the moral landscape. The paper concludes by drawing some of the consequences of these views for the nature of moral thought.

Seeking out Epistemic Friction in the Philosophy of Religion

Philosophical practice does not take place in an intellectual or social vacuum, hence it is important to consider how we can improve our social environment when engaging in philosophical reflection. In this paper, I recommend that philosophers of religion seek out epistemic friction, by exposing themselves to viewpoints that are in tension with their own. I first provide an overview of work in experimental philosophy of religion that shows that philosophy of religion presents a distorted epistemic landscape that does not reflect the religious and ideological diversity of human reasoners at large and that privileges particular aspects of Christian theism and scientific naturalism. I respond to two potential objections against the call for increased epistemic friction: epistemic partiality and imaginative resistance. The paper concludes by outlining ways in which philosophers of religion can go outside of their comfort zone and engage more with alternative, under-represented points of view.