The Foundations of Fiction

International Workshop

11 November 2024

9.30 – 17.00 (CET)

Sala 113, Università degli Studi di Milano, via Festa del Perdono 3, 20122 Milan / Online

Programme:

9.30: Manuel García-Carpintero, "On the Mood for Fiction"

ABSTRACT: How should we think of the utterances that convey (literary) fictions? MacDonald (1954) and Searle (1974/5) argue that they are mere pretense – the simulation of acts like assertions or questions. They don’t constitute sui generis, dedicated representational practices of a specific kind, fictionalizing, on a par with assertions or questions. This has been the standard view in analytic philosophy since Frege until the 1990s, casually endorsed by Austin, Kripke, van Inwagen and many others. Alward (2009), Predelli (2019, 2020), and Recanati (2021) still endorse the view, but Walton (1990) and others provide decisive objections, predicated on its lack of explanatory power. Walton himself also rejects views of the kind MacDonald and Searle question, which take fictionalizing to be a sui generis speech act; Currie (1990) articulated one such account in a Gricean framework, while García-Carpintero (2013), Abell (2020) and Bergman & Franzén (2022) argue for conventionalist, Austinian accounts. Following Currie I classified speech acts of fictionalizing as directives; the latter authors defend classifying them as declarations, like giving out players, naming ships or sentencing offenders. I'll question the declaration view, but I'll also explore another alternative to the directive account, by considering whether fictionalizings are a variety of constative act.

10.45: Samuel Lebens, "Stories, Worlds, Centers, and Contradictions"

ABSTRACT: Ever since David Lewis' reflection on truth in fiction, scholars have recognised the value (as well as the limitations) of thinking about stories in terms of possible worlds or sets thereof. Even if a story is better understood in terms of a set of propositions that we're instructed to treat as true, which would better allow for stories that contain impossibilities, we still end up with something – a set of propositions – which is somewhat reminiscent of a possible world, even if – unlike possible words, a set of propositions can be gappy or incomplete. In this paper, I argue that we should think of stories not merely in terms of possible worlds (or sets of propositions), but in terms of centered possible worlds (or centered sets of propositions). This, I will argue, allows us to individuate stories more finely, around their narrative centres, such that more than one story can be served by just one possible world (or set thereof, or by just one set of propositions). Appeal to a narrative center, I shall argue, also allow us to better understand when contradictions are an aesthetic flaw in a story and when not.

12.00: Merel Semeijn, "Ho Ho Hoaxing! What Santa Can Teach Us About Fiction"

Hoaxing has been studied in media studies as a special kind of mass deception. Yet, a hoax is not simply a massive lie. For a stereotypical hoax to both work, and receive appropriate recognition, it must create a temporary split in its audience. Some audience members are momentarily deceived and take the discourse as factual, while other audience members are 'in the know' and take it as non-factual. I explore the benefits and limitations of an analysis of hoaxing in terms of (addressees' beliefs about) common ground updates. Very roughly, a hoax is simultaneously a lie and a fictional statement. Someone that hoaxes that p proposes that, at first, at least some conversational participants are deceived into believing that p (and believe that others also believe that p, etc.), but the hoaxer also proposes that it becomes eventual common belief that p is merely true in some fiction/story.

14.45: Eileen John, "Fiction, Humour and Understanding the Atypical"

ABSTRACT: This paper draws on research in early child development that studies children's abilities to distinguish joking from pretending. These are interestingly related activities, as both ask children to develop competence in somehow non-literal aspects of behaviour and speech. Hoicka and Martin frame the grasp of joking and pretending as important to understanding 'the value of atypical acts – those that may appear to be wrong compared to the norm' (in 'Two-Year-Olds Distinguish Pretending and Joking', Child Development 87(3), 2016: 916). I want to reflect on this distinction more broadly, to see how it can be a route into understanding the norms and norm-violations that matter to sustaining a practice of fiction. I will then consider some examples of fiction that (I think) combine the fictional and the funny, in order to argue that humorous fiction asks for affective and cognitive responses that are not well captured by the terms of make-believe.

16.00: Neri Marsili, "What Is Fiction? Experimental Survey Data on the Folk Distinction Between Fiction and Nonfiction"

ABSTRACT: Philosophers have long sought to analyse the concept of fiction, often relying on intuitions about specific cases, as is common in conceptual analyses. However, the extent to which philosophical intuitions align with those of laypeople remains unclear. In this study, we conducted a series of surveys on US participants to investigate the lay concept of fiction and nonfiction. Our preliminary results suggest that laypeople's intuitions diverge quite radically from those of philosophers, and that no extant definition closely tracks the folk concept of fiction.

Organizers: Filippo Contesi & Elisa Paganini