Peter Langland-Hassan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati and author of Explaining Imagination (OUP, 2020).
A post by Peter Langland-Hassan
This post was submitted in response to Jonathan Weinberg’s recent post at The Junkyard, “Hanging Up on the In-the-Fiction Operator”
Many thanks to Jonathan Weinberg for this thoughtful and challenging critique of my operator-laden account of enjoying fictions (developed in Chapters 10 and 11 of Explaining Imagination). He raises questions and generates worries that I’m sure others will have. In reply I will make one defensive point in favor of operators and one offensive point against doing without.
Defense first: the main thrust of Jonathan’s arguments against in-the-fiction operators is that they prevent us from representing fictional characters in a suitably direct way. Instead, they place us in a kind of meta-relation to the fiction—forcing us to think about it as a work of fiction, or as an aesthetic object—in a way that seems at odds with being concerned for the characters themselves. Consider, for instance, the belief that in the fiction Othello, Othello kills Desdemona. Jonathan explains that “because that ‘in the fiction Othello’ is a sentential operator, such a sentence makes no reference to such entities as Othello and Desdemona, but just characterizes the content of a particular work of fiction.” This observation leaves me puzzled. The content of a fiction is what the fiction is about. This includes its events and characters. So, if the operator-involving sentence truly “characterizes the content” of the fiction, then a mental state with the content of that sentence should allow us to think about the content of the fiction: its characters, events, and settings themselves. This holds generally of operators. If I believe that Joe believes that Sally is in danger, then I am thinking both about Joe’s belief and its content. (In fact, the only feature of his belief I’m thinking about is its content!) As the content of his belief is the proposition that Sally is in danger, I cannot think about his belief without thinking about Sally herself.
For related reasons, I’m puzzled by Jonathan’s claim that “our psychological systems that generate emotional responses in us do not seem able to ‘see into’ propositional representations that are sub-parts of larger propositional representations.” Suppose that I have stolen the crown jewels and I come to believe that Detective Jones believes that I am the culprit. This new belief makes me anxious. Is this not because my emotional responses have “seen into” the content of Detective Jones’s belief?
It is true that, very often, we will not respond emotionally when acquiring a belief in the same way that we would have had that belief not involved an operator. Perhaps this phenomenon partly fuels Jonathan’s view about the “opacity” of operators. Believing that Earth is under alien attack will have very different emotional consequences than believing that, in Mars Attacks, Earth is under alien attack. Likewise, believing that Detective Jones believes that I am the culprit will have a very different effect on me than my believing that I am the culprit. But then, we shouldn’t be surprised that changing the content of a belief (via an operator) can change the effect it has on our emotions. Nevertheless, I’m not detecting a general phenomenon at work where operator-involving beliefs are ipso facto processed in a regularly different way. But perhaps I have missed the point. I invite Jonathan to say more on this.
In any case, Jonathan’s idea—no doubt intuitive to many—is that the use of “in the fiction” operators in beliefs and desires will consign those states to generating emotions that are meta-fictional in nature, having to do with, say, aesthetic features of the work (see, e.g., his 1984 example). The contrast he points to is an interesting one: being angry at how the fiction was constructed by its author versus angry about what happens to one of its characters. But I see no reason to pin that difference on the presence, or absence, of a relevant “in the fiction” operator. Both kinds of emotions may be triggered by beliefs and desires about what is true in the fiction. There is, however, another distinction that might help us understand the contrast: our beliefs and desires about what is true in the fiction will at times lead to meta-fictional judgments about what is true of the fiction—such as that it has an unsatisfying ending. The latter is a legitimate meta-fictional belief that is caused, in part, by prior beliefs about what is true in the fiction. Nevertheless, it is obviously not true in the fiction that it has an unsatisfying ending. One would be making a false judgment about the fictional world if one were to judge that, in the fiction, there is an unsatisfying ending (unless there being such is somehow part of the plot). This helps to clarify that we have not yet ascended to the level of meta-fictional judgment in making judgments about what is true in a fiction. Meta-fictional judgments about what is true of the fiction may be arrived at from judgments about what is true in the fiction, but they are not to be identified with them.
So much by way of defense. The offensive move I mentioned connects to Jonathan’s nightmarish speculation in the last paragraph of his post. One of the main reasons I saw fit to defend an operator-involving view in Explaining Imagination was for the simple reason of explaining how our fiction-related beliefs and desires manage to refer to the proper (fictional) characters that they do. To rehash some of those thoughts: Jonathan proposes that the desire that Desdemona survives is partly responsible for the anguish we experience when she is killed by Othello. Suppose that my neighbor happens to be named ‘Desdemona Richardson’ (though she normally goes by ‘Des’). Naturally, I wish for her survival. Now suppose that Jonathan approaches me at the APA and shows me a video on his phone of a performance of Othello—the part where Desdemona is killed. I haven’t been following the plot and am obviously unmoved.
He asks me, “Don’t you want Desdemona to survive?”
“Of course,” I say, “but how do you know Des? Is she all right?!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, wait,” I say, “Are you talking about Desdemona Richardson, from Cincinnati?”
“What? No. Desdemona of Othello, the play I’m showing you on my iPhone.”
“Oh,” I say, “sorry…no, I admit that I don’t really care if that Desdemona survives.”
The moral of this absurd tale: not all desires that we would (initially) describe as the desire that Desdemona survives have the same causal powers. Much depends on which of the many possible Desdemonas is the referent of the ‘Desdemona’ in the ascription. Of course, this is true outside of fiction as well. The judgment that John has been arrested on drug charges will behave quite differently in your cognitive economy depending on which John it concerns. Such differences must be reflected in the content of the mental states used to have such thoughts, otherwise the thoughts themselves cannot have the causal powers (or capture the behavioral dispositions) that we expect. One way (not the only way) to do so is to see names as disguised definite descriptions, where a properly explicit ascription of the judgment would attribute this definite description in place of the ambiguous proper name. In the case of fictional characters, it is natural to think that the fictionality of the character—and the specific fiction from which the character derives—will enter into this description. We can then distinguish the desire that the woman who is my neighbor and goes by ‘Des’ survives from the desire that the fictional character named ‘Desdemona’ in Othello survives. And I see no reason not to characterize the latter desire as the desire that, in the fiction Othello, Desdemona survives. In the last paragraph of his post, Jonathan seems attracted to a similar view, where the fiction-related desire would be explicitly characterized as the desire that Desdemona, of the Othello fiction, survives. I do not immediately see an important difference in these two possible ways of characterizing the explicit content of the Desdemona desire. I’m curious to hear if others do.
It was a heretical argument of Explaining Imagination’s Chapter 10 (which wasn’t Jonathan’s target in his post) that this kind of disambiguation of the content of our fiction-related states would also be necessary within our fiction-related imaginings—and not just fiction-related beliefs and desires—were we to conceive of such imaginings as distinct from our beliefs, as most do. After all, there is no reason that the question of which Desdemona my imagining concerns—and why it concerns that one, and no other—should get a different answer just because she is being represented through use a (belief-like!) imagining. “In the fiction” operators—or Jonathan’s nightmarish prepositional phrases—would be needed in our sui generis imaginings as well.