The Cognitive Value of Philosophical Fiction

Jukka Mikkonen

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781472579669
• eBook ISBN: 9781441129703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Can literary fictions convey significant philosophical views, understood in terms of propositional knowledge? This study addresses the philosophical value of literature by examining how literary works impart philosophy truth and knowledge and to what extent the works should be approached as communications of their authors. Beginning with theories of fiction, it examines the case against the prevailing 'pretence' and 'make-believe' theories of fiction hostile to propositional theories of literary truth. Tackling further arguments against the cognitive function and value of literature, this study illustrates how literary works can contribute to knowledge by making assertions and suggestions and by providing hypotheses for the reader to assess. Through clear analysis of the concept of the author, the role of the authorial intention and the different approaches to the 'meaning' of a literary work, this study provides an historical survey to the cognitivist-anti-cognitivist dispute, introducing contemporary trends in the discussion before presenting a novel approach to recognizing the cognitive function of literature. An important contribution to philosophical studies of literature and knowledge.

1

Fictive Use of Language

In this chapter, I shall study theories of fiction in the analytic tradition, focusing on issues concerning fiction’s relation to truth-seeking and assertion. I shall first show how fiction is traditionally defined negatively by saying what it lacks, and then point out that recent theories of fiction, formulated in terms of ‘make-believe’, also have their problems. The four historical views of fiction I shall introduce before treating the recent theories of fiction can be roughly called the falsity theory, the non-assertion theory, the pretence theory and the story-telling theory.¹ After examining the recent ‘make-believe’ theories, I shall show that in analytic aesthetics, the conception of fiction is in general realistic and that it derives from theories of fiction-making, and then propose my view of literary fiction-making.

Fiction as negative discourse

The falsity theory

Philosophical theories of fiction may roughly be divided into two groups, semantic and pragmatic theories.² Semantic theories aim to define fiction in terms of reference and truth. Roughly put, they consider a work fiction if its sentences are false or if it fails in its references. The view of fiction as a work which consists of falsehoods has a long history. Roughly, it can be reduced to David Hume’s (ironic) notion of poets as ‘liars by profession’³ or even to Plato’s critique of poetry in The Republic. The modern philosophical formulation for the falsity view was given by Bertrand Russell, who in his Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1948) is generally seen to put forward a theory of fictional names which also applies to imaginative literature.⁴ For Russell, propositions in Shakespeare’s Hamlet were false simply because there was no one called ‘Hamlet’. In his theory of descriptions, Russell considered non-referring sentences false, for he saw them to incorporate false existential claims.⁵ The falsity theory was based on the notion that sentences in fictions do not conform to reality; because (most) sentences in fictions would turn out to be false about the actual world if applied as assertions in non-fictional discourse, the falsity theory declared fictional sentences false.

Nevertheless, the falsity theory and other semantic definitions of fiction are inadequate in defining fiction. While there are semantic properties typical of fiction, for example, that proper names do not usually have denotation and that the descriptions in the work are not generally true of the actual world, such properties are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for something being fiction. First, there are fictions in which proper names have denotation and descriptions are true of the actual world – or would be true, if applied as factual descriptions or assertions. Second, non-fictional discourses, history, for instance, might also fail in their references. The semantic features mentioned are typical for works of fiction, not definitive of them. Moreover, while third-person fictional narrative might be the only device to ‘legitimately’ depict third-person consciousnesses (internal monologue), all (third-person) fictional narratives do not depict third-person consciousness.⁶ ‘Fiction’ is therefore primarily not a semantic but a pragmatic concept; it is not defined in terms of truth or reality but in terms of the author’s use of language.⁷ According to pragmatic theories, the fictionality of the content of a work is due to the author’s fictive mode of utterance, not how things are in the world. In this study, I shall limit my scrutiny, on the basis of the objections mentioned above, to pragmatic theories of fiction.

The non-assertion theory

The proponents of the non-assertion theory took their cue from Sir Philip Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie (1595), in which Sidney declares that ‘[n]ow for the Poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth’.⁸ Nevertheless, before becoming a popular theory of fiction in the first half of the twentieth century, the non-assertion theory, which was implicit in Sidney’s dictum and later in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notion of the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’,⁹ was given a philosophical formulation in Gottlob Frege’s theory of meaning. In his article ‘On Sense and Reference’ (1892) Frege claimed that in reading works of fictional literature readers are not interested in the reference (Bedeutung) but, apart from ‘the euphony of the language’, in the sense (Sinn) of the sentences that constitute the work. As Frege saw it, works of art are not approached for their truth, and hence it is irrelevant whether the name ‘Odysseus’ has a referent or not.¹⁰ Further, in his article ‘The Thought: A Logical Inquiry’ (1918), Frege stated that indicative sentences in fictional literature do not have assertive force. According to him, a ‘stage assertion’ is ‘only apparent assertion’, ‘only acting, only fancy’.¹¹

In part inspired by Frege, the focus of interest in twentieth-century discussions in the philosophy of fiction moved from semantics and the denotation of proper names in fiction to pragmatics and the author’s referential intentions. Frege’s remark about the distinction between the content of a work of fiction and its mode of presentation was developed by P. F. Strawson, who asserted that ‘sophisticated romancing’ and ‘sophisticated fiction’ depend upon ‘a spurious use’ of language. In his example, Strawson begins a story with ‘The king of France is wise’, continued ‘and he lives in a golden castle and has a hundred wives’, which Strawson considers sufficient to make the hearer understand, by stylistic conventions, that the speaker was neither referring nor making a false statement.¹²

Following Strawson’s notion, H. L. A. Hart was one of the first to speak about the story-teller’s distinctive use of language. Hart argued that there is a substantial difference between assertive and fictive use of language, for there are no existential presuppositions in the latter. As he saw it, the ‘storyteller’s use of sentences does not in fact satisfy the conventional requirement for normal use, but he speaks as if they did’.¹³ Roughly stated, the tradition inspired by Frege maintained that the author offers propositions whose sense (or meaning) the reader is to entertain or reflect upon. In these non-assertion theories, the author’s mode of utterance was considered negatively as a language which simply lacks assertive or referential force.

The pretence theory

The non-assertion theory has, nonetheless, also been considered inadequate, for it has been noted that besides not asserting, the author is doing something else. So-called pretence theories maintain that in producing fiction, the author is engaging in the act of ‘pretence’.¹⁴ Pretence theories of fiction may be roughly divided into three groups: the pretending that something is the case theory, the pretending to be someone theory and the pretending to do something theory.

The traditional philosophical theory of fiction-making as pretence advances the view that in writing fiction, the author is pretending that something is the case. As Gilbert Ryle, for instance, saw it, in writing fiction the author presents ‘a highly complex predicate’ and pretends that what she says is the case.¹⁵ Likewise, Margaret Macdonald asserted that in producing a fiction, the storyteller pretends ‘factual description’ and, in the case of Thackeray ‘there was a Becky Sharp, an adventuress, who finally came to grief’, and by his pretence the story-teller created Becky Sharp.¹⁶ In turn, the pretending to be someone theory has been advanced by philosophers such as David Lewis, who maintained that in writing fiction, the author ‘purports to be telling the truth about matters whereof he has knowledge’ and ‘to be talking about characters who are known to him, and whom he refers to, typically, by means of their ordinary proper names’, without the intention to deceive.¹⁷

The most well-known pretence theory of fiction is, however, the so-called Austin–Searle view, a view based on a theory of speech acts, in which fiction writing is considered as pretending to do something, namely, the author pretend to perform illocutionary acts.¹⁸ I shall limit my scrutiny of pretence theories to the Austin–Searle view, because it is the best known and most debated account on the subject and my criticism of it also applies, for the most part, to other pretence theories. Moreover, since the Austin–Searle view has been highly influential and still has its supporters, I shall examine it in detail.

The Austin–Searle view derives from J. L. Austin’s lectures posthumously published in How to Do Things with Words (1962). For Austin, sentences used in fiction are ‘etiolated’, or ‘parasitic’ upon the normal use of language. In Austin’s view, the utterances expressed in novels are close to those ‘spoken in soliloquy’, since both are ‘hollow’ or ‘void’, contrary to utterances in the so-called serious use of language. As Austin sees it, in speech acts used in fiction, the normal conditions of reference are suspended.¹⁹ Austin himself, however, excluded fictive utterances from closer examination.

John R. Searle developed Austin’s notions in his well-known article ‘The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse’ (1975). Searle begins his examination of fictive utterances by juxtaposing them to assertions. He then introduces four mandatory rules for assertive speech acts or ‘Assertives’: First, ‘the essential rule’ presupposes that the maker of an assertion commits herself to the truth of the proposition she expresses. Second, ‘the preparatory rules’ exact that the speaker must be able to provide evidence for the truth of her proposition. Third, the proposition in question must not be obviously true to both the speaker and her audience. Fourth, as ‘the sincerity rule’ demands, the speaker commits herself to a belief in the truth of the proposition. If the speaker fails to comply with any of these rules, her assertion will be classified defective, Searle asserts.²⁰

To illustrate the difference between assertions and fictive utterances, Searle juxtaposes Miss Shanahan, a New York Times journalist, and the novelist Iris Murdoch. He argues that as a newspaper journalist Miss Shanahan is putting forward assertions and is held responsible for the way her utterances relate to the world: she has to commit herself to the truth of the propositions she expresses and must be ready to support them with evidence, or reasons, if the truth of the propositions is challenged. Moreover, Searle argues that Shanahan should not assert something that is obviously true to her and her audience. If she fails to comply with any of these rules, her assertion will be classified defective; if she fails to ‘meet the conditions specified by the rules’, she will be said to be false, mistaken or wrong; if she asserts something people already know, it will be considered pointless; if she does not believe in what she asserts, she can be accused of lying. As Searle sees it, the situation is the contrary in the case of Iris Murdoch, for the rules do not apply her. When writing fiction, Murdoch is not committed to the truth of the propositions she expresses, were the propositions true or false, and therefore she cannot be said to be insincere. Furthermore, as she is not committed to their truth, she is not committed to providing evidence for them, even if evidence was available.²¹

According to Searle, a fiction writer is not asserting but ‘pretending, one could say, to make an assertion, or acting as if she were making an assertion, or going through the motions of making an assertion, or imitating the making of an assertion’. For Searle, pretending to do something or be something is ‘to engage in a performance which is as if one were doing or being the thing and is without any intent to deceive’. Therefore, he sees Iris Murdoch, when writing fiction, to engage ‘in a nondeceptive pseudoperformance which constitutes pretending to recount to us a series of events’ and pretending to ‘perform a series of illocutionary acts, normally of the assertive type’.²² Searle argues that in third-person narrative the fiction writer pretends to perform illocutionary acts, while in first-person narration the writer does not only pretend to perform illocutionary acts but to be the narrator. As a conclusion, Searle states that what makes a text fiction is the author’s illocutionary stance: the author’s utterance act is real, while the illocutionary act is pretended.²³

The Austin–Searle view has been considered misguided for various reasons. To begin with, it has been noted that Searle does not explicate the notion of ‘pretence’ on which his theory is based.²⁴ Searle’s critics have pointed out, for example, that pretending implies two simultaneous and inseparable acts: one that is only pretended and another that is performed by means of the pretending of the first. If one takes the author to pretend to make assertions, then one should ask what she achieves by pretending.²⁵ Likewise, it has been claimed that the author does not merely utter words (the utterance act) but also conveys the sense of the words.²⁶ Furthermore, it has been argued that pretending is neither sufficient for nor necessary in producing fiction. Walton, for one, remarks that, first, pretending to make illocutionary acts is not a sufficient condition for producing fiction, because not all pretended illocutionary acts produce fiction.²⁷ Second, Walton notes that pretence is not even a necessary condition, because the author could claim truth for every sentence she writes and still write fiction.²⁸ I shall examine the Austin–Searl...

Table of contents

• FC
• Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Fictive Use of Language
• 2 Literature and Truth
• 3 Meaning and Interpretation
• Concluding Remarks
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index