Greg Currie is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York. He has published numerous articles and books dealing with fiction, film, imagination and the arts. His current main project is a book, Signs of Agency, under contract with Oxford University Press.
This week at The Junkyard, we're hosting a symposium on Greg Currie’s recent book: Imagining and Knowing: The Shape of Fiction. Today we begin with an introduction from Greg. Commentaries and replies will appear Tuesday through Thursday.
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Common opinion connects fiction and the mind in two ways: via our capacity to imagine, and via our capacity to know things. Imagining and Knowing argues that the value of the imagination for explaining what fiction is and how it works is sometimes underestimated, and that the capacity of fiction to provide learning is often exaggerated. That fictions are devices for exercising the imagination won’t quite do as a definition but it is not far off, and in conjunction with plausible principles about how we prioritise intentions, it does a good job of accounting for the more robust intuitions we have about what is fiction and what isn’t. I suggest that it is also a mistake to think that fiction is a concept with an interesting, and on some views recent, history.
The book also argues that the imagination comes in a variety of forms well beyond the standard distinction between imagery and propositional imagining. Imagination invades and partly colonises the domains of desire and of emotion.
While not denying fiction’s capacity to give us reasonable beliefs (and even sometimes knowledge) as well as skills and enhanced capacities, the book argues that there is every reason to be doubtful about some of the more ambitious claims of this kind that have been made. Philosophers and literary theorists have made claims for which they ought to have sought empirical support; they would have found it hard to locate. It is often said that fictions offer us thought experiments in the way that philosophy and science do. But the idea that fictions have the qualities that make for an (epistemically) good thought experiment breaks down under pressure. Some arguments that great writers are especially insightful when it comes to human affairs and that fictions are especially good at making us more empathic go the same way. At the least, those who say we learn from fiction owe us better arguments, and better evidence.