A post by Marta Benenti

Climate Change in Fiction

Alongside the efforts of scientists and journalists to communicate the magnitude of climate change and the urgency of taking action to mitigate it, the arts promise to play a relevant role in raising people’s awareness. In particular, over the past 20 years a new narrative genre has flourished called Climate Fiction, or, patterning after the more established “Sci-fi” label, “Cli-fi”.

Typically, Cli-fi stories present scenarios where climatic conditions determine the narrated vicissitudes and influence characters’ practical, socio-political, and psychological lives. Popular examples in the Anglophone landscape are movies like The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Interstellar (2014), or Snowpiercer (2013), and novels like Solar (2010), MaddAddam (2013), or The Overstory (2018).

It is reasonable to hypothesize that such works may modify people’s view of current and forthcoming environmental disasters by increasing their sensitivity towards environmental threats and inciting them to take action accordingly. Following this intuition, psychologists have tested changes in Cli-fi recipient’s beliefs. According to Anthony Leiserowitz’ 2004 study, for example, watching The Day After Tomorrow significantly increased viewers’ preoccupation with possible environmental catastrophes and influenced their opinions on the most adequate model to forecast climate changes. On the literary side, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (2020) showed that short Cli-fi stories affected participants’ beliefs in the anthropogenic nature of global warming and increased their risk perception.

But being that these narratives are mostly fictional by definition, how can they affect our beliefs about our own real world? This is not a new question for philosophy. What is new is its application to a specific genre of fiction that is rooted in a particularly timely condition of humans’ life.

Thought Experiments

Questioning the capacity of fictional narratives to provide readers and viewers with knowledge about reality, some philosophers have appealed to the notion of “thought experiment”. Similarly to actual experiments, performing a thought experiment amounts to getting a grip on some aspect of reality by exploiting an experimental setup and attending to the consequences that might follow (Brown & Fehige 2019). Yet, in the case of thought experiments, such a setup is imagined. Moreover, whereas in actual experiments we manipulate physical models, in thought experiments we imaginatively manipulate mental models (Nersessian 2018).

We can be invited by the thought experimenter to imagine a brilliant color scientist who has never seen colors, because she lives in a black and white room; or to suppose we are a brain connected to a computer that perfectly simulates real experiences; or else to imagine locking a cat in a steel box together with a machine that in the course of an hour may disintegrate it, but equally likely may not; or that there is a running trolley hurtling along the railway tracks where five people are trapped...

In all these famous thought experiments, the conclusions we derive from the made-up scenario are meant to apply not only to the situation we are asked to imagine, but also to generalize beyond it: to cases analogous in some respects to the one evoked by the experiment, and to facts, beliefs, intuitions or theories about the world.

It has been argued that fictional narratives are akin to thought experiments (Elgin 2014). Besides sharing a basic narrative structure, when we imaginatively engage in works of fiction, it is held, we are required to accept the rules of the game and to build a mental model accordingly. We must for instance suspend our disbelief about some of the conditions that apply within the fictional world – but not necessarily in our world – and retain or abandon certain background assumptions following the instructions provided by the narrative. All these requirements impose constraints on our imaginative engagement, like in a lab where experimental conditions must be kept under the experimenter’s control.

Do Climate fictions work as thought experiments?

Should these structural resemblances between fictional narratives and thought experiments hold, we could easily conclude that Cli-fi narratives have an impact on our beliefs owing to their functioning like thought experiments. They indeed set up scenarios where global warming is a concrete phenomenon and no longer an elusive ghost, invite us to provisionally abandon some constraints imposed by reality (our current political and social organization, scientific advancements, everyday habits), to retain others (rise in temperatures, widening of the economic gap between rich and poor, basic laws of physics), and to imaginatively witness the consequences.

Unfortunately, this overlap between fictional narratives and thought experiments has been downsized, especially in the light of the manifoldness of literary genres. Not all works of fiction function as thought experiments, runs the objection, and the cognitive value of only some of them can be so explained (Huemer 2019). Do Cli-fi works belong to this class?

Interestingly, Science fiction is often mentioned as one clear example of fictional narrative that works as thought experiments (e.g Swirski 2007; Vidmar 2013; Wiltsche 2019; Brown & Fehige 2019). Thus, one available strategy to argue that Cli-fi functions in the same way might rely on the manifest resemblances between these genres. Yet, those who defend this view usually appeal to the claim that Sci-fi stories, along with fantasy, horror, utopias and dystopias, invite us to imagine that something is the case against the background assumption that that is not actually the case (Davies 2010). That is, one pivotal factor of recipients’ engagement with Sci-fi seems to be that they accept in imagination but do not believe that what is narrated obtains in the real world. As in thought experiments, the required setup needs to be imagined precisely because it cannot be realized, for instance, in a lab. For why engage in a thought experiment if we can have it realized? Why build a mental model if we can simply manipulate an existing one?

All things considered, it seems they do…

If fictional narratives influence our beliefs by eliciting thought experiments only as long as the story’s setup is presented as implausible or impossible to experience in real life, then it seems that Cli-fi cannot be treated as a thought experiment. Because in Cli-fi, creators are extremely concerned that what they recount is not only conceivable, or possible in our world, but even real and accepted as such by recipients.

Some of Cli-fi’s features corroborate this point. First, Cli-fi typically treats climate science seriously. Regardless of their being reported correctly or rather misconceived, authors have an interest that the scientific models in their stories be at least plausible. Think of Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer where a catastrophic glaciation results from an attempt to stop global warming based on reliable climatological data. Moreover, an increasing number of Cli-fi works feature a world that is extremely close to ours, like Benedikt Erlingsson’s movie Woman at War which is set in contemporary Iceland. True, dystopian scenarios are still quite common for the genre, but their interest resides precisely in those characteristics that they share with the real world. Finally, most Cli-fi characters appear affected by climate changes with a high degree of realism: be it the impact on the way life is re-organized in a transfigured environment, or on the characters’ psychology – like in Jenny Offill’s novel Weather – it seems crucial that recipients vividly imagine what happens to characters so as to empathize with them.

Why thus insist that Climate fictions function as thought experiments, instead of accepting that they teach us something about the real world by faithfully portraying some of its features?

Here is my tentative reply, or at least the path I would like to take. The appeal to thought experiments grounds the cognitive value of fictional stories in an imaginative mechanism that is widely maintained to provide us with knowledge. However, one may contend that, rather than evidence of a truth, thought experiments – and, by analogy, fictional narratives – provide us with a source of hypotheses and with reasons to take those hypotheses seriously (Elgin 2014).

Accordingly, thought experiments designed by Climate fictions may not result in an increased knowledge about environmental issues (which scientific reports are better equipped to convey), but rather in a better framing and increased understanding of it. They instruct us about how to build a mental model and observe it running. We thus use imagination to adopt a perspective on environmental issues that find their correlates in the real world. Such a move can lead to a revision of our beliefs, a more vivid depiction of certain effects of climate change, feelings of urgency, discomfort, uncertainty – but also to doubts or denial. Whatever the specific outcome, we – readers and watchers – try to make sense of the possible consequences of climate change thereby transcending the narrated, imagined setup and landing in our own, real, endangered world. 

Including Cli-fi among fictional narratives that function as thought experiments might entail a step towards an integrated account of its persuasive power, while contributing to the broader debate about what makes thought experiments well suited to explain some of the imaginative mechanisms elicited by fiction.

* * * 

This is part of a broader project about the persuasive power of Cli-fi that I am carrying out with Lisa Giombini. My own contribution to this research is funded by the Italian Minister of University and Research, PON scheme “Green.”

References

Brown, J. R. and Fehige, Y. (2019), “Thought Experiments”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 Edition), E. N. Zalta (ed.), <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/thought-experiment/>.

Davies D. (2010), “Learning through Fictional Narratives in Art and Science”, in R. Frigg and M. Hunter (eds.), Beyond Mimesis and Convention: Representation in Art and Science, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 262, Dordrecht: Springer, 51–70.

Elgin, C. Z. (2014), “Fiction as Thought Experiment”. Perspectives on Science, 22: 221–241.

Huemer, W. (2019), “Power and Limits of a Picture: On the Notion of Thought Experiments in the Philosophy of Literature”, in F. Bornmüller, M. Lessau, and J. Franzen (eds.), Literature as Thought Experiment? Paderborn: Fink.

Leiserowitz, A. (2004). “Before and after the day after tomorrow: a U.S. study of climate change risk perception”. Environment, 46: 22–37.

Nersessian, N. (2018), “Cognitive Science, Mental Models, and Thought Experiments”, in Michael T. Stuart et al. (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments, London and New York: Routledge, 309–326.

Schneider-Mayerson, M., Gustafson, M. Leiserowitz, A., Goldberg, M. H., Rosenthal S. A. & Ballew, M. (2020), “Environmental Literature as Persuasion: An Experimental Test of the Effects of Reading Climate Fiction”, Environmental Communication.

Swirski P. (2007), Of Literature and Knowledge: Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments, Evolution, and Game Theory, Routledge.

Vidmar, I. (2013), “Thought Experiments, Hypotheses, and Cognitive Dimension of Literary Fiction”. Synthesis Philosophica, 55–56: 177–193.

Wiltsche, H. (2019), “The Forever War: Understanding, Science Fiction, and Thought Experiments”. Synthese. 198, 3675–3698.