Personification without Impossible Content

PhD Dissertation, 2020

In recent metaphysics, the questions of whether fictional entities exist, what their nature is, and how to explain truths of statements such as “Sherlock Holmes lives in 221B Baker Street” and “Holmes was created by Arthur Conan Doyle” have been subject to much debate. The main aim of my thesis is to wrestle with key proponents of the abstractionist view that fictional entities are abstract objects that exist (van Inwagen 1977, 2018, Thomasson 1999 and Salmon 1998) as well as Walton’s (1990) pretense view, which denies the existence of such entities. In the process, I propose modifications to these views to deal with problems they face and show how the modifications better account for the philosophical data. Key abstractionists (van Inwagen 1977, Thomasson 1999) make a strict distinction between discourse within fiction, in which statements about literary characters cannot be literally true, and discourse about fiction, as it occurs in literary criticism, where statements about fictional characters can be literally true. Fictional objects are postulated to account for the truth of the latter. This runs into trouble because statements thought to be literally true are not literal. (Yagisawa 2001, Friend 2002) I provide a uniform analysis to account for the truth of statements involving fictional characters by appealing to a presupposition involving a metaphor in both contexts. The presupposition is that there is an x such that x is fictional; x is likened to a real person; and x is and ought to be treated/counted as a real person for all relevant intents and purposes. More generally, I adopt Everett and Schroeder’s (2015) realist view that fictional characters are ideas constituted by mental representations. This, to me, better accounts for how fictional characters are created within the world’s causal nexus (unlike non-spatiotemporal entities in abstractionism), among other things. One key challenge they face is to explain how ideas can possess properties such as being a detective. I present a fine-grained version of their view, according to which the mental representations constituting fictional entities encode mind-dependent properties. Moreover, I explain how reference to such representations is possible, using Bencivenga’s (1983) Neo-Kantian view of reference and Karttunen’s (1976) view on discourse referents. Finally, I suggest that the identity of fictional characters is interest-relative. The constant, and sometimes radical, change of properties that, fictional characters can undergo is taken to be a consequence of the fact that unified mental representations are bundles of simpler mental representations. As change occurs, simpler representations are replaced by others. A key theme that runs through the thesis is that neither fictionality nor pretense is relevant to the semantics of fictional sentences—a claim bolstered by Matravers’ (2014) arguments. Whether or not my account works, this claim, as well as the new philosophical data I bring up, are some of the challenges I pose to the heart of established views.

Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, 2023

In this paper, I shall argue for the representational character of literary fiction. The aim is not to defend a theory of fiction as representation but to highlight the iconic or experiential nature of literary fiction. Drawing mainly on Beardsley (1981, 1982) and Matravers (2014), I shall outline a notion of representation that helps to make sense of literary fiction as a specific kind of representation or verbal depiction. Literary language gives presence, vitality, and force to the represented world, but verbal representation like visual representation requires the imaginative collaboration of the reader. In addition to grasping the linguistic meaning of the text, the reader must make sense of the actions and attitudes of the characters and consider them, together with situations and events from the author’s point of view. Imaginative collaboration involves more than adopting a propositional attitude of make-believe toward the sentences’ content. It also encompasses mental activities such as visualising, empathising, responding emotionally, and entertaining expectations and desires in response to the represented content. As it is often defended, it is in the reader’s experience that the world of a novel comes into existence. This is not to say that the reader creates the work; rather in understanding a literary work, the reader’s experience is closely tied to the mode of presentation and perspective of the work.

2017

This chapter seeks to define the existential status and truth-value of fictional characters, with frequent appeals to multiple iterations of Sherlock Holmes as an example. It surveys two rival schools of thought, drawn from metaphysics and possible-world semantics. Alexius Meinong's "non-existent objects", i.e. the metaphysical approach, is shown to be qualitatively different from how we think of fictional characters. David Lewis's "truth in fiction", derived from counterfactual logic and possibleworld semantics, fails to address the particularities of fictional characters as they are represented anew across multiple iterations. By contrast, I advance that fictional characters are best thought of as "quasi-existent"a stipulated term that conveys how their imagined existence is neither reducible to real-world knowledge nor is the sum of their textual iterations. In conclusion, I suggest how "quasi-existent/existence", however counterintuitive, may prove productive to future theories of fiction.

This paper will explore the engagement between phenomenology and the arts, specifically fiction. It is my contention that fiction provides a host of phenomenologically relevant experiential data that can be used to help further one’s development as an existential agent. To facilitate this I will look at how phenomenology provides a solution to the paradox of fiction. The paradox of fiction asks: how is it that we have a real emotional response to fictional characters or situations when we do not believe that these characters or situations actually exist? This paper will attempt an answer to this so-called paradox by arguing for a phenomenological solution that utilises Merleau-Ponty’s approach to aesthetics. For Merleau-Ponty the work of is an expression of a particular artist’s lived point of view on the intersubjective world of experience. The work of art is an artefact of that expression that can then be re-experienced by those who engage with the work mediated through their own lived experience. What one responds to when one has an emotional reaction to a piece of fiction is not the character per se, but rather the possibility of a different lived perspective on the world that the character opens up for the reader. The emotional response then is to the expression of the possible point of view on the world, and the existence of the character as such is inconsequential. By providing an expression of different points of view on the world, fiction allows for the development of one’s emotional life through the phenomenological engagement with those emotions in a controlled environment. This phenomenological approach to fiction bears not just on one’s emotional development, but it also fosters the development of one’s aesthetic, ethical, and inter-personal life. Since first person description of lived experience is a hallmark of phenomenology, fiction, by providing phenomenologically rich descriptions of how other people experience the world is of the utmost importance to phenomenology.

This thesis is concerned with the ways in which meaning is generically mediated in the novel. In particular it addresses the productive diversity of meanings generated by critical interpretation and asks how, given this diversity, comprehension and consensus might be possible. I argue that the construction of subject, object, space and time is achieved in the novel through different manifestations of four key metaphors: voice, view, setting and event. These metaphors supply meanings that rely on a common experience of embodiment. Embodiment supplies the basis for an intersubjectively established consensus which identifies subjects and objects in terms that correspond to the semiotic, syntagmatic and semantic uses of metaphor. I begin by surveying and reviewing certain constructionist accounts of language and meaning in order to establish the importance of metaphor in conveying meaning in rhetorical, rather than linguistic, terms. I then discuss two examples of continental philosophy on speech: Derrida on voice and Foucault on discourse. I demonstrate how meaning is rhetorically constructed according to the use to which metaphors are put—whether they denote formal, semantic, or functional aspects of meaning—through an explication of Foucault’s theory, reserving Derrida’s grammatology for my analysis of the stabilisation of meaning in the theory of certain narratologists (Gérard Genette and Marie-Laure Ryan). Voice and view are key terms in literary theory, and I examine refinements to these metaphors in Genette and Ryan. The insistence of these narratologists on restricting the rhetorical dimension of meaning undermines the value of the literary work, prompting me to argue for a relaxing of such constraints. I read Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang for its uses of voice and point of view, many of which expose the limitations of the narratological approach. This is a theoretical thesis, which engages a wide range of perspectives—constructionist, deconstructionist, sociological and structuralist—together with their various accounts of language, metaphor, speech and meaning. In terms of sociological approaches to genre and discourse, I employ the chronotope as a critical tool, examining it in the context of the theme of the country house to demonstrate the role of two of my key metaphors, setting and event, which are important for the construction of space and time in abstract terms. Focusing on novels by Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Kazuo Ishiguro, in which the country house defines the space and the temporality through which thematic and “material” elements are mediated, I reveal how the chronotope supplies an overarching coherence that unites thought and event in narrative. My readings of these novels describe a theory that is concerned with the rhetorical capacities of genre rather than with taxonomic constructions of form. To this end I argue that the metaphorical dimensions of narrative—voice, view, setting and event—be loosely drawn, according to the acknowledged mutability of genre. I also emphasise the constructive effect of metaphor whilst according it a rhetorical versatility consistent with the mutability and instability of genre as a semiotic tool, concluding that consensus is achieved in our readings of novels through the form’s reliance on these four key metaphors of embodiment. These metaphors have ordinary, everyday, widespread usage beyond narrative theory; in appreciating their rhetorical value, it must be noted nonetheless that any confusion that ensues is productive, for it results in the diversities of meaning and form celebrated in the literary work.

Starting from the main current views this essay considers whether entities (e.g. characters) in fiction should be viewed as abstract objects. I highlight some features of the historical concrete-abstract distinction, and, in particular, how entities in fiction are involved in our moral thinking. Here I call attention to an aspect of moral thinking orthogonal to that which currently divides moral realists and moral fictionalists and sketch an argument for fictional entities being in a specific sense concrete. Although the article does not, per se, call into question the approach to metaphysics according to which fictional characters are not like concrete objects, it exemplifies how a different perspective on the job of metaphysics (e.g. Cora Diamond's realistic spirit) gives the problem of fictional entities a radically different shape.

It is sometimes said that fictional consciousnesses are represented in narrative texts. I aim to show why this kind of representationalism is fundamentally flawed. Drawing on the work of philosophers who, like Daniel D. Hutto, have advocated the “enactivist” approach to cognition, I argue that consciousness and subjective experience cannot be captured in representational terms; consciousness can either be had (in a first-person way) or attributed (in a third-person way). I suggest that we tend to adopt the same basic stance towards real people and fictional characters: we make a “consciousness-attribution” on the basis of external signs (such as gestures and language) thought to be expressive of consciousness. In some special cases, however, literature invites us to adopt another stance (which I call “consciousness-enactment”), whereby we enact (or perform) the experience that we, at the same time, attribute to a fictional character. In my article, I explore the consequences of these ideas on major narratological problems, such as the experientiality of narratives and focalization.

There is widespread agreement among philosophers that we refer to, think or talk about non-existent objects in much the same way as we refer to, think or talk about other objects. This paper explores the case of objects of fiction in the perspective of Husserlian philosophical phenomenology. In this perspective, everything objective is dealt with as object of some consciousness and as presenting itself in subjective modes. Within the scope of this paper, the focus of the descriptive analysis will be on showing in some detail how conscious experiences of intentionally referring to something fictive in pre-linguistic intuitive acts of imagining something are to be articulated with regard to the object of consciousness, i.e. noematically, and with regard to the intentional act, i.e. noetically. Special attention will be given to the reflective finding of some consciousness being intentionally implied and thereby modified in the very performance of an intentional act of representifying (vergegenwa¨rtigen) something in fiction and to the question of identity and individuation of objects in fiction. It will be argued that modifications occurring in representificational consciousness, which Husserl called 'as-if' or 'quasi' modifications, provide the key for understanding the phenomenology of fictional intentionality and reference.