Hannah Kim is an assistant professor at Macalester College. She works on fiction, philosophy and literature, and Korean aesthetics.
A post by Hannah Kim
Philosophers argue that imagination comes with varying degrees of sensory accompaniment. “Propositional/suppositional imagination” involves imagining that something is the case and lacks sensory aspects while “objectual/enactment imagination” involves imagining a particular object or bringing forth a selected mental state (Yablo 1993, Goldman 2006). If this distinction holds, imagining per se doesn’t require mental picturing. And this matters for philosophy of fiction because it shows how a content can be fictional without being objectually imaginable.
Setting aside the related question of whether there’s a special connection between fiction and imagination, I’ll show that skepticism about impossible, empty, and unlimited fictions is really about objectual imagination, which isn’t necessary for fictional truth. Not all fictional content needs to be imaginable in a phenomenologically robust sense. I’ll mostly focus on visual imagining, but the point generalizes to other senses; something’s being fictional doesn’t depend on its being richly imaginable.
Impossible Fiction
Some philosophers (Lewis 1978, Hanley 2004, Bourne and Caddick-Bourne 2016) argue that fictions can’t feature impossible states of affairs where “impossible” is usually meant to pick out the logically impossible. Physically impossible content, such as talking animals, or metaphysically impossible content, such as butterflies made of bread and butter, tend not to bother philosophers. The first worry involves the principle of explosion: If a contradiction can obtain in fiction, then everything would be true in the fiction. We might also think that fictional content ought to supply information on what a given situation is like. In “Sylvan’s Box,” Graham Priest describes a box that is both empty and filled. Just what kind of box should the reader imagine in this case?
We’ll return to the first worry, but for now, notice that spelling out the second worry leads to objectual imagination, imagination concerning a particular object or situation. We might try to do without the word “imagination,” but paraphrases asking what kind of situation we’re dealing with, or what kind of box is involved in the story, all have to do with how we’re supposed to mentally pick out the peculiar box as to imagine certain things about it.
These worries are ultimately about readerly phenomenology, not fictionality. The worry isn’t over what is so according to the fiction—that bit is clear. In fact, we wouldn’t even have a problem unless we understood the unusual nature of the box! “Sylvan’s Box” clearly involves a box that is both empty and filled. What kind of imaginative activity is authorized or encouraged around the box, on the other hand, is less clear—and perhaps debates about impossible fiction concerns this latter question.
Kung (2010) and Stock (2017) have argued that propositional imagining is enough for fictional content. Imagining isn’t imaging, and we can mentally keep track of what is true according to a story without robustly picturing the content. Most philosophers deny that mental imagery is necessary for imagination in general (e.g. Walton 1990, Yablo 1993), so propositional imagining might be enough to render something fictionally true.
Xhignesse (2021a) disagrees, arguing that propositional imagining isn’t relevant to the question of whether impossible content can be fictional. When it comes to fictional truth, it is reflective reading—a holistic approach with high epistemic standards—that we want, not occurrent reading—a more surface-level reading that is geared towards pleasure. Reflective reading requires an all-things-considered judgment, and propositional imagining, given its light requirement for us to simply imagine that something is the case, doesn’t fit the kind of reading we engage with when asking about fictional truth.
I agree with Xhignesse that figuring out what is true in a story involves a careful and holistic approach to the work. But I disagree that propositional imagining doesn’t require reflective reading. Cognizing the bare facts about what’s true in the story—that is, propositionally imagining the content—requires interpretation, and reflective reading is required in order to produce an overall interpretation of what is true in the story.
It might be difficult to know how we are to engage with logically inconsistent material. We might lose confidence that we’re mentally picturing what we ought to be picturing. But it’s too quick to argue that anything that eludes rich imagining isn’t a product of reflective reading. Whether or not an interpretation is sophisticated (i.e. whether one reads in reflective or occurrent mode) and whether or not the resulting content is vividly imaginable are two separate questions whose answers admit no exclusive relationship. It’s plausible that a reflective reading only recommends or requires propositional imagining. When a holistic interpretation leads us to impossible content, we can cognize that it is represented while running into trouble objectually imagining the content. But this block only denies a phenomenological take on what the represented content is like, which is a separate issue from whether the content is, or can be, fictional.
Consider Escher’s drawings. Though his “Ascending and Descending” and “Waterfall” feature impossible structures, we admit them to have been represented. (It’s an open question just what kind of content can be perceived, or what we see in an illusion, though many philosophers think drawings can depict impossible figures (Priest 1999, Elpidou 2016, Leddington 2022)). At the very least, we have an asymmetry: we readily admit that Escher paintings feature impossible architecture, but we question whether “Sylvan’s Box” really features an impossible object.
I think this is because drawings immediately give a visual sense, even if illusory, of what those impossibilities are like. They do the phenomenological work for us, so we don’t doubt what’s depicted; there’s no gap in objectual imagining, so we don’t register any trouble with the content. Impossible drawings suggest that impossible objects can be depicted, or at least made fictional; all it takes is a representation of an impossible object. If this is so, we might think impossible objects can be represented through a written medium and made fictional as well, even if it’s unclear how we ought to objectually imagine them if encountered without a visual representation.
Unlimited Fiction, Empty Fiction
If we maintain a distinction between fictional content and what is to be objectually imagined, unlimited fiction and empty fiction might be fine, too.
An “unlimited” fiction is a fiction in which every proposition is true. Wildman and Folde (2017) argue that creating one is relatively easy: all you need is a contradiction to obtain in the story, and the principle of explosion will give you a fictional world in which everything is true. Xhignesse (2021b) replies that readers take contradictions as a cue to engage with the work in a particular manner, and that logical contradictions are mostly confined to “phictions”—short stories that philosophers concoct for the sake of advancing some argument—which lack genuine status as a story.
But, again, Xhignesse’s points don’t have to do with limits of fictional content. The difficulties he points to, though certainly related to unlimited fiction, have to do with the difficulty of creating a narrative work that would have unlimited truths, and the difficulty of getting the reader to engage with the contradiction at face value.
We might think that unlimited fiction couldn’t exist because, well, what is it for a fiction to have no beginning and end? We like to know what a given fictional world is like. But, again, this worry focuses on a fictional world’s picturability. We just wouldn’t know what kind of story we’re dealing with, but this trouble doesn’t get in the way of our cognizing that we have a world in which everything is true. If given a true-or-false quiz about it, we would mark all statements as True and pass. Resistance against unlimited fiction is more about objectual imagination and readerly experience than limits of fictional content.
For the same reasons, we should also think empty fictions—fictions in which nothing is true—can exist. It might be that some fictions lack content because there is no discernible situation that obtains in the fiction. Empty fiction doesn’t require that the work of fiction be empty; it just means that nothing is true according to the work, perhaps because we can’t tell whether the narrator is unreliable or ironic. Or imagine a work like A Clockwork Orange but the neologisms are so complicated that even with repeated exposure we can’t figure out what the unfamiliar words mean. We may even have multiple works telling the same story in which nothing is true.
What about the phenomenological worry—that we have no idea what it would be like to engage with an empty fiction? Wildman (2019) answers that readers are still free to imagine whatever they’d like while reading as long as they understand that nothing is fictionally the case. Imagination that accompanies fiction engagement doesn’t necessarily have to cohere with what is fictionally true. This suggests how we ought to think about the relationship between fiction and imagination more generally, but I’ll leave that for another time.
References:
Bourne, Craig, and Emily Caddick Bourne. 2016. Time in Fiction. Oxford: OUP.
Goldman, Alan. 2006. Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading. Oxford: OUP.
Elpidou, Andreas. 2016. “Seeing the Impossible.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 74 (1): 11-21.
Hanley, Richard. 2004. “As Good as It Gets: Lewis on Truth in Fiction.” Australian Journal of Philosophy, 82(1): 112-128.
Kung, Peter. 2010. “Imagining as a Guide to Possibility.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 81(3): 620–663.
Leddington, Jason. 2022. “Oscar Reutersvärd's Impossible Triangle” in Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics.
Lewis, David. 1978. “Truth in Fiction.” American Philosophical Quarterly, 15(1): 37-46.
Matravers, Derek. 2014. Fiction and Narrative. Oxford: OUP.
Priest, Graham. 1997. “Sylvan’s Box: a Short Story and Ten Morals.” Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 38(4): 573-82.
———. 1999. “Perceiving Contradictions.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 77(4): 439-46.
Stock, Kathleen. 2017. Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation and Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Walton, Kendall. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
Wildman, Nathan. 2019. “The Possibility of Empty Fictions.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 77(1): 35-42.
Wildman, Nathan and Christian Folde. 2017. “Fiction Unlimited.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 75(1): 73-80.
Xhignesse, Michel-Antoine. 2021a. “Imagining Fictional Contradictions. Synthese 199: 3169-3188.
———. 2021b. “Exploding Stories and the Limits of Fiction.” Philosophical Studies, 178: 675-92.
Yablo, Stephen. 1993. “Is Conceivability a Guide to Possibility?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 53(1): 1-42.