Steph Rennick is a research associate at the University of Glasgow. She works on time travel, foreknowledge, tropes, and other fun things, and runs the Epicurean Cure.
A post by Steph Rennick
(A caveat, before we get underway: throughout, I’m going to mention folk intuitions. What precisely they are, and what role they ‘really’ play in philosophy, are matters of great contention on which I will happily remain neutral (but see Pust 2019 for more detail, if you’re interested). Here I have in mind the sort of thing that is the output of X-Phi or armchair musing on thought experiments, and that is at least ostensibly used as a starting point for conceptual analysis and to ensure all parties are talking about the same thing, and that is sometimes claimed as evidence in favour of a view. With that out of the way, let us begin!)
I like to read TV tropes. Partly because it’s a different way of spending time with the books, games and shows I enjoy, but also because I’m interested in patterns, and which ideas capture the popular imagination and gain enough traction to become tropey.
A trope, for the uninitiated, is a recurring motif or idea that can manifest across any media where stories are told (think knights in shining armour, squishy wizards, or Glaswegian-accented villains). There are also more overtly philosophical tropes: you can’t change the past, free will requires choice, the person goes with the mind rather than the body, and so on.
My interest in these fictional patterns extends to my working hours. One of the nice things about fiction, as many philosophers have pointed out, is that it presents us with richer and more varied vignettes to elicit folk intuitions than we might have dreamed up on our own (see for instance Cameron 2015, Ichikawa & Jarvis 2009). Our thought experiments are typically limited by our imaginations; we might transcend this limitation by outsourcing to other creative minds.
But there is a way to leverage a much broader pool of imaginations, and that’s to engage at the level of tropes. To consider patterns, rather than mere instances. In a recent paper, I proposed that tropes “reveal which theories, concepts and ideas we find intuitive – repeatedly and en masse” (Rennick 2021). I suggested that tropes can provide insight into the landscape of folk intuitions on a given topic, without either having to leave the comfort of one’s sofa or rely on one’s own philosophically-contaminated intuitions as a proxy for everyone else’s. Tropes can reveal where there’s a disconnect between the philosophical canon and the spectrum of folk intuitions, or provide a diachronic picture of how the latter has changed over time (for instance, here in 2021, I can get a sense of how folk intuitions about time and time travel have changed since the publication of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, without needing one of my own). In philosophy we typically ask people to report on their intuitions, or extrapolate from our own as to what theirs might be; with trope analysis we look also at what they have made and engaged with.
Of course, tropes – and the intuitions with which they correlate – need not indicate what people believe to be the case (Earlenbaugh & Molyneux (2009) argue, for instance, that intuitions are neither belief- or credence-entailing). There are various ways we might cash out what intuitiveness amounts to, e.g. what we judge or what appears us to be true, plausible, or possible; what we are inclined to believe, and so on (see for example Chudnoff 2011; Nagel 2007; Kornblith 2007; Williamson 2016). Minimally, it seems plausible that tropes can serve as a guide to what the folk take to lie within the boundaries of possibility. This fairly weak claim was sufficient for the paper and the methodology it introduced.
But there’s a further question that remains outstanding (for me at least!), which is whether tropes can provide any insight into what is really possible, not just what people take to be possible. There has been considerable discussion regarding the link between what we can imagine more generally and what is possible. On one hand, as Liao and Gendler (2019) note, various familiar modal arguments rely on the claim “that what one can imagine functions as a fallible and defeasible guide to what is really possible in the broadest sense”. On the other hand, one fairly common objection to the use of fiction to elicit intuitions points to our ability to imagine impossibilities: as Descartes puts it, “fiction makes us imagine a number of events as possible which are really impossible” (1950:5). Similarly, others contend that fiction encourages us to entertain conceptual falsehoods (e.g. Van Inwagen 1993).
If operating at the level of tropes, we needn’t worry about every fictional impossibility or conceptual falsehood, because only the ideas that are sufficiently pervasive count. But even so, there are at least some tropey cases in which the folk and philosophers differ with regards to where they draw the boundaries of possibility. Time travel stories are an example particularly close to my heart, and among the many tropes associated with them is the dreaded “Temporal Paradox”: logically impossible but nonetheless perpetuated. As described on TV Tropes, a temporal paradox is
“A contradiction of causality within the timeline brought about by Time Travel. Theorized to be dangerous to the fabric of reality, and known to be dangerous to the brains of anyone who tries to get their head around them… Punishments for creating a paradox vary. You might instantly vanish from history or cause your time-travelling self to be erased; you might be immune but find the world around you different; you might destroy reality itself; heck, you might even accidentally unleash killer flying time monkeys.”
Still, time travel is notoriously mind-bending. I am sympathetic to the following from Ichikawa and Jarvis (2009: 233):
“There does seem to be a useful notion of conceptual possibility to which… conceivability is an excellent guide. Conceptual possibility is closely tied to what one can rationally and coherently conceive. If a proposition is a conceptual possibility, then an ideal rational agent can coherently conceive of it as true…”
I find compelling the idea that there’s a kind of possibility tied to what we can imagine that picks out something interesting and useful. Importantly, there are limits to what people will entertain, even for the length of an episode. If an idea is too unintuitive – that is, if it is intuitive to too few people, or in too few contexts – it does not survive to become a trope. Whether or not one buys the stronger claim that what we can imagine functions as a fallible and defeasible guide to the possible, I’m tempted by the idea that a single instance of successful imagining might be more fallible and more readily defeated than repeated imagining of the same thing across different contexts. Tropes indicate what people are repeatedly and popularly willing and able to imagine; perhaps then they serve as a more reliable guide to what’s possible than individual instances.
For now, I remain unsure about how best to answer the question of what tropes tell us about possibility. But I suspect that says more about the limits of my own imagination; perhaps I should outsource it to the folk!
References
Cameron, R. P. “Improve Your Thought Experiments Overnight with Speculative Fiction!”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy XXXIX, 2015: 29-45.
Chudnoff, E. “What Intuitions Are Like”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LXXXII No. 3, 2011: 625-654.
Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. Lafleur, L. J., New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1950.
Earlenbaugh, J. & Molyneux, B., “Intuitions are inclinations to believe”, Philosophical Studies Vol. 145, 2009: 89-109.
Ichikawa, J. & Jarvis, B. “Thought-experiment intuitions and truth in fiction”, Philosophical Studies Vol. 142, 2009: 221-246.
Kornblith, H. "Naturalism and Intuitions“, Grazer Philosophische Studien Vol. 74, 2007: 27-49.
Liao, S. & Gendler, T. “Imagination”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/imagination/.
Nagel, J. “Epistemic Intuitions”, Philosophy Compass Vol. 2 No. 6 (2007): 792-819.
Pust, J. “Intuition”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Summer 2019 Edition, Edward N. Zalta (ed), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries/intuition/.
Rennick, S. “Trope analysis and folk intuitions”, Synthese, 2021: 1-19.
Van Inwagen, P. “Naïve Mereology, Admissible Valuations, and Other Matters”, Nous Vol. 27 No. 2, 1993: 229-234.
Williamson, T. “Knowing by Imagining” in Kind, A. & Kung, P. (eds.), Knowledge Through Imagination. New York: OUP, 2016: 113-123.