Jukka Mikkonen is a Researcher in Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Mikkonen's research focuses on the philosophy of literature and the aesthetics of nature. His publications include The Cognitive Value of Philosophical Fiction (Bloomsbury 2013) and Philosophy, Literature, and Understanding: On Reading and Cognition (Bloomsbury 2021).
This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Patrik Engisch and Julia Langkau’s (eds.) recent book: The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition. On Monday, we began with an introduction from Patrik Engisch and Julia Langkau. Commentaries appear Tuesday through Thursday. Today, Jukka Mikkonen comments on the papers in Part III: Imagination and The Cognitive Role of Fiction.
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The last section of The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition, entitled “Imagination and the Cognitive Role of Fiction”, contains four chapters that defend the view that one’s imaginative engagement with fictional works may lead to improvement in one’s social understanding. The chapters offer new aspects to the matter and provide a very generous amount of food for thought.
María José Alcaraz León proposes that the cognitive value attached to fictions is best explained in terms of special and medium-specific experiences and responses which the fictions produce. I find Alcaraz León’s turn to artistic experiences interesting and appreciate her insistence on the role of representational medium in the search for distinctive value of artistic cognition. Yet, grounding the cognitive value of fiction on audience’s experiences will arguably cause new challenges for cognitivist theories.
Alcaraz León worries if the medium specificity of artistic experiences is a problem for the cognitivist enterprise: “How can these peculiar and medium-dependent experiences be significant with respect to understanding real-life experience, broadly understood?” I think that the question goes beyond the representational medium; ‘literature’ alone is such a rich and diverse garden. One might expect that there are significant differences between literary periods and genres – say, realism, modernism, postmodern metafiction – with regard to their epistemological underpinnings and the kind of imaginative engagement they call for. One may find various kinds of intellectual insight in fictions as diverse as Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915), and Joyce’s Ulysses (1920), but I doubt whether those insights are comprehensively captured in mimetic terms (such as “experiential content”) or by some specific form of imagination (such as ‘perspectival’ or ‘organizational’ imagination).
I am fascinated by Alcaraz León’s idea that “the reflective nature of artistic experience is grounded upon the ways in which works thematize the conditions of the medium they belong to”; and that the “gist of artistic experience is [...] not merely the imagined content they can afford, but the possibilities of experiencing visual, temporal, kinesthetic, etc., aspects in relation to a medium; that is, as showing us—or as making us aware of—the grammar of that medium”. Of course, when we speak of thematization and themes, we make interpretations that are open to dispute; so too, when we derive insights from a dramatic setting and apply them to the actual world.
Moreover, Alcaraz León speaks of the reflective character of artistic experience; how it has some cognitive value; and how “it allows experiencing—or at least becoming aware of—certain aspects of the conditions under which we experience and represent the world” (emphases added). Fictions certainly provide one an opportunity for a reflective experience, but anti-cognitivists certainly have a point in claiming that whether a reader (or spectator) uses that opportunity – and what a reader (or spectator) makes out of it –, is another matter. Is it, then, that the cognitive effects of fiction are subjective and contingent? Further, do some fictions allow more or better places for reflective experiences, and if yes, why is that?
Olivia Bailey, in turn, offers an original view of the value of fiction in improving social cognition that is based on the notion of ‘sensibility’, that is, a world orientation and its emotional evaluation. Bailey proposes that works of fiction could activate our “alternative patterns of evaluative apprehension” or sensibilities that differ from our “‘home’ sensibility”. I find also this proposal intriguing. In particular, I like the idea, which I take it to imply, that fiction could provide us a place for reflecting our (repressed) side selves.
But what is the epistemic nature of sensibilities represented in fiction? How do we know that the author is a reliable guide to those ways of feeling, thinking and acting or whether s/he is simply offering us her prejudices and thus perhaps reinforcing our biases? (The same goes for everyday imaginative scaffolding, which Bailey illustrates via sports fandom: while I love hockey, I certainly do not admire it “in virtue of its being especially aggressive and violent”, as the hockey fan Bailey projects, but for clever passes and intelligently orchestrated goals.) And while our selves might be many, are we open-minded enough to fully simulate, say, disturbing sensibilities or traits of personality we find uncomfortable? Finally, there is the question of interpretation: while Bailey claims that omniscient narration may transparently represent characters’ inner life, we must not be too trustful, as heterodiegetic narrators may also be unreliable.
In her chapter, Amy Kind aims to explain how and why reading fiction fosters imagination and helps us to practice empathetic imagination. According to Kind, “[i]n fiction, we encounter a wide range of people living in a wide range of situations and who are undergoing a wide range of experiences. By presenting us with these lives, fiction enables us to stretch our capacity for empathy in new directions.” Again, I am thinking of the author’s epistemic reliability. How do we differentiate between false insights that ring true and fictional representations that might lead to genuine experiential knowledge? A fiction might also persuasively reinforce our biased assumptions about what it feels like to be someone other, as the volume editors remind one in their introduction. Someone other? Although an immersed reading takes fictional characters as real people, many literary theorists and philosophers have illustrated that fictional minds are aestheticized and thematized entities: overly linguistic artefacts whose actions are partly dictated by dramatic requirements.
I am very sympathetic to these cognitivist positions, but I also think that one ought to seriously consider the recent criticism of empathy as i) a reliable epistemic guide and a basis for moral judgments because of its (selective) focus on individual and its dismissal of social and political structures (e.g. Jesse Prinz, Paul Bloom) and ii) as an integral part of literary interpretation or a typical or desirable response to fictions (e.g. Richard Posner, Peter Lamarque, Gregory Currie).
Do I really know what the other thinks and feels and what is good for her or am I (well-intendedly) rather imposing my view of good life on her? (Provocatively put, what is Nussbaum’s mentioned view of cosmopolitanism else than cultural imperialism?) And were fiction to enhance our capacity to understand others, would not that equally improve our ability to manipulate and harass others?
Kind also suggests that fictions might have cognitive value in cultivating our imaginative skills: “it also gives us practice at recombining source material that we already have in new and different ways, and this too stretches imagination”. I find this view fascinating and the claim intuitively plausible. Yet, I wonder how such improvement contributes to everyday thinking and how could we study or find support for this kind of claims?
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The section also includes Anna Ichino’s chapter, which does not explore the cognitive value of fiction, but is rather a fascinating take on a timely matter, namely, conspiracy theories, and to the question whether they might qualify as fiction as defined by Kendall Walton in his Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990). As Ichino sees it, “many cases of conspiracy theories’ endorsement can be described in terms of games of make-believe in which such theories are used as props”.
Certainly – but the phenomenon discussed is quite heterogenous. Conspiracy theories are endorsed or “endorsed” (at least) by people who disbelieve them (Kremlin’s disinformation about Nazis and biolabs in Ukraine), people who genuinely believe them or explore them as live hypotheses, people who rather cry for help than really try to understand the world (a mother afraid of vaccinating her child), and people who take them as sheer entertainment and play the game to see how the conspiracists (group II) respond.
In characterizing the conspiracist mindset, Ichino points to research in social sciences that suggests that the point of conspiracist thinking “is not much believing in particular alternative theories, but disbelieving whatever the official story says” and, further, that “contradictions are the rule, not the exception, in conspiracist thinking”. (This is a very interesting connection to propaganda, such as Kremlin’s production of contradicting information: Russia wants to have peace and to negotiate about Ukraine and Russia might use nuclear weapons.)
“Thick representations” such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and similar hoaxes put aside, it seems that the conspiracy theories presented by Ichino differ from fictions such as novels, which consist of large classes of fictional propositions that mandate imaginings and generate fictional truths. In many conspiracy theories, in turn, there are fewer propositions and more room for imaginative supplementation (“Do your own research.”). Do not the conspiracist claims that Ichino introduces (Princess Diana was killed, Princess Diana faked her own death) generate different fictional worlds? How do the conspiracists collectively play a game of make-believe with contradicting fictional truths? Should we perhaps approach the phenomenon – e.g. the online conspiracy communities – as producing joint fantasies? Surely, there are also elements (Big Pharma, chemtrails) and agents (the Rothschilds, JFK) that unite conspiracy theories; the ancient myth of blood libel, such as the claim that Jews need the blood of non-Jewish children for baking matzah, is still around: today, its the “Cabal”, “adrenochrome”, and – Heinz ketchup (!). A conspiracist’s reference to the “globalists” already projects a rich network of associations in a fellow mind, but there might be little unifying fictional propositions or a collectively imagined fictional world.
Further, while many conspiracists seem to merely seek new “evidence” for countering the offical view, some others engage in truth-seeking imagination. For instance, the documentary film Behind the Curve (2018) depicts a community of Flat Earthers, some of them trying to experimentally test their hypotheses. Indeed, a community: conspiracist thinking resembles religious experiences with regard to certain elements and psychological mechanisms: “awakening”, the “chosen ones”, paradoxes and epistemic contradictions. This might be another interesting aspect in the future study of imagination in conspiracist thinking.