Further Reflections on Fictionality: Rejoinders to the Responses (original) (raw)
Related papers
Fictionality As Rhetoric A Response to Paul Dawson
Narrative, vol 23,1 January 2015, 2015
We thank Paul Dawson for his well-informed, thoughtful, and collegial response to our "Ten Theses about Fictionality. " We would like to respond in kind, especially because doing so gives us an opportunity to expand on and clarify key points of our essay. We shall proceed by making a few global points about the relationship between his Ten Theses and our Ten Theses and then turning to specific comments on his Ten.
Exploring fictionality: Afterword
Exploring fictionality: Conceptions, test cases, discussions, ed. Cindie Aaen Maagaard, Daniel Schäbler, and Marianne Wolff Lundholt. University of Southern Denmark Studies in Literature, 69, 2020
The essays in this volume do a great job of exploring the relation between fictionality and factuality from multiple perspectives, engaging (explicitly and implicitly) in a stimulating dialogue between those two terms, between theory and example, and between different approaches to the issues and concepts involved. I value especially the range of the particular cases studied: the variety of discourses encompassed in the volume includes political speeches, generic fiction, biography and autobiography, historiography, advertising, journalism, and the municipal design vision statement; the media embraced, beyond language in various print media, include oral discourse, blogs, comics, television, and photography. This is an abundance of riches, and the detail of the individual case studies rewards close engagement. Every example is of interest not only for the sake of the argument in hand, but as an opportunity to test, clarify and refine the conceptual framework that informs the volume as a whole. I found myself caught up in the detail of every essay, but it is clearly not feasible for me to engage with each one on that level here; nor would doing so be the most likely route to a coherent retrospect upon the volume. Yet the examples here are of primary importance, precisely because the theoretical and methodological orientation that informs the essays is currently underspecified, and raises some fundamental questions.
Filozofia, 2017
Fictionalism about fictional entities is an antirealist approach. It suggests that statements of literary criticism are to be understood in the same way as are fictional statements. The latter are naturally understood as being uttered in a pretend mode, i.e. not seriously. Fictionalism has it that the same holds for the former. It is sometimes argued that this is unfaithful to our actual linguistic practice with critical statements. My aim is to strengthen this objection by pointing to some unwelcome consequences of the fictionalist position. It seems plausible that our practice with critical statements allows us: a) to supplement their utterances by remarks such as " And I mean it " or " What I have just said is true " ; b) to report on their utterances by using statements such as 'X asserted that C' (where X is a speaker and C is a proposition expressed by a critical statement); c) to ask for arguments that would support the truth of critical statements; d) to agree or disagree with other speakers over the truth of critical statements. If fictionalism were correct, our practice with critical statements would not permit moves of these kinds.
Fictionality as Rhetoric: A Distinctive Research Paradigm
The rhetorical account of fictionality has drawn considerable attention in narratological circles, but the extent to which it is fundamentally at odds with other approaches, despite their diversity, has not been recognised. This essay aims to elucidate the significant departure from all previous contributions to the theory of fiction, achieved by conceiving of fictionality as a resource integral to direct communication, not the quality marking fiction's detachment from its framing communicative context.
Ten Theses Against Fictionality
Narrative 23.1 (2015): 74-100, 2015
This essay situates recent rhetorical approaches to fictionality in relation to existing philosophical and literary-critical debates in the field, with a focus on how these debates have informed contemporary narrative theory. In particular, the essay addresses the rhetorical approach in relation to: 1) its claims to break decisively from previous scholarship on fictionality; 2) the ramifications for the study of narrative fiction; and 3) its relationship to postmodernism and the narrative turn. While the essay takes the form of a polemic, its aim is not to dismiss the value or significance of fictionality as a field of study, but to locate its development in a disciplinary context and clarify the contributions it stands to make to narrative theory.
On the Systematic Inadequacy of Fictionalism about Fictional Characters
Philosophia, 2019
Critical statements, if true, bear ontological commitments to fictional entities. A well-known version of fictionalism about fictional characters tries to eliminate these ontological commitments by proposing that we understand critical statements as prefixed by a special sentential operator, such as 'according to a fictional realist theory'. The aim of the present paper is to show that fictionalism about fictional characters is underdeveloped as it stands because it can be shown to be systematically inadequate. Because the fictionalist's paraphrases of critical statements suggest that fictional realists affirm the propositions expressed by critical statements, the fictionalist mistakenly attributes to fictional realists an expertise in matters that pertain to literary criticism. Importantly, this problem of misattributed expertise paves the way to other issues that might be much more devastating to the fictionalist project. It can be shown that, because she wrongly attributes expertise to fictional realists, the fictionalist unintentionally portrays fictional realist theories in a way that renders them inconsistent and self-defeating. This undermines fictionalism about fictional characters because it leaves no workable fictional realist account in which to ground a fictionalist explanation. This is why the fictionalist about fictional characters should try to eliminate the problem of misattributed expertise and its related issues. At the end of the paper, I sketch some of the available options in this regard.
Questioning or Qualifying Fictionalism
Jordan Feenstra
An overview of work on fictionalism likely produces the observation that the position grants the philosopher endorsing fictionalism the ability to avoid any ontological commitment to the abstract or exotic entities entailed by apparent reference in characteristic examples, like Sainsbury’s (2010) Holmes Sentence—“Holmes lived on Baker Street”. I provide a series of considerations that index a variety of differing forms of fictionalism (cf. Yablo 2001, Sainsbury 2010, Eklund 2011). I then indentify a handful of possible problems resulting from popular qualifications of fictionalism(s), and include what seems to be the most important problem facing fictionalism in general. A systematic attempt to (dis)qualify fictionalism in all its varieties or to exhaust the levels of complexity therein would involve a larger conversation not yet completely organized; among the aforesaid, this implicitly suggests the categories of consideration needed for such a dialog.
2018
Possible and narrative worlds are traditionally the most influential tools for explaining our understanding of fiction. One obvious implication of this is considering fiction as a matter of pretence. The theory I offer claims that it is a mistake to take truth as a substantial notion. This view rejects possible worlds and pretence as decisive features in dealing with fiction. Minimalist theory of fiction offers a solution that gives a way to combine a philosophical theory of meaning and views of literary theory. Narrative worlds approach saves its usefulness since its focus is more in the psychological process of reading. Minimalist theory of fiction is based on the minimal theory of truth and the use theory of meaning. The idea of language games as a practice of constructing contextual meanings is also decisive. A sentence is not true because it corresponds to a fact but because it is used in a right way in certain circumstances. The rejection of the possible worlds approach is thu...