Anhui Huang is a philosophy PhD candidate at UC Berkeley. Her main areas of research are language and epistemology, with a focus on certainty, assertion, and inquiry. She also works on philosophy of fiction, especially questions about truth in fiction and imaginative resistance.
A post by Anhui Huang
Fictions are Instructions for Make-Believe
Tonight I am in the mood to cook. So I open New York Times Cooking and find myself a recipe: Ali Slagle’s Sheet-Pan Feta with Chickpeas and Tomatoes. The first item under “Ingredients” is “3 cups cooked chickpeas, drained, rinsed, and shaken dry.”
So I go to the grocery store and purchase two cans of chickpeas. When I get home, I drain the liquid, rinse them, shake them dry, and measure out three cups.
This is an ordinary case of following the instructions in a recipe. Notice, though, that the recipe never explicitly tells me to do these things. Instead of saying “Purchase some chickpeas. Then drain them and rinse them…”, it simply lists the chickpeas as an ingredient and describes the state that it needs to be in. Still, I understand what I am supposed to do, because I know what a recipe is and how it is supposed to be interpreted.
I think fiction works the same way.
A work of fiction doesn’t typically say: “Now imagine there is a car. Now imagine that the car is moving and some other cars are chasing it…” But I know what I am supposed to imagine or make-believe, because I know what fiction is, and I am familiar enough with the rules and conventions for interpreting fiction. I know, for example, that quotation marks typically instruct me to make-believe that certain words are spoken, and that a shot following a shot of a character's gaze typically instructs me to make-believe that it represents what the character sees.
A work of fiction, I propose, stands in the same relation to imaginative activity that a recipe stands in to cooking: a fictional work is the author’s instructions for how to engage in imaginative activity. Fictional engagement is then a collaborative practice between the author and the audience. The author gives instructions for how to engage in various imaginative activities, and the audience interprets and follows these instructions.
Truth in Fiction
How, then, should we understand truth in fiction? What makes it true that in Harry Potter Hermione is a good witch and is at least three feet tall, and false that Voldemort has purple hair?
Two existing accounts are particularly illuminating here: Kendall Walton’s (1990) and Gregory Currie’s (1990).
According to Walton, fictions are props for make-believe, much like the objects that children play around with in their games of make-believe. Just as the shape and color of the banana prescribe make-believing it as a yellow telephone, so too do fictional works prescribe certain kinds of make-believe. What is true in a fiction is what is prescribed to be make-believed by the props that are fiction.
According to Currie, when we consume a work of fiction, we are really imagining that some reliable informant is telling us about what has happened. Currie calls this imagined informant the “fictional author” (Currie 1990, 75-80), a reliable, historically situated fictional character that we construct and take to be telling us the story as known fact. The fictional author is distinct from both the actual author of the fictional work and the explicit narrator (if there is one): unlike the actual author, the fictional author belongs to the fictional world; and unlike the explicit narrator, the fictional author is always reliable. For Currie, a claim is true in fiction just in case an informed reader can reasonably infer that the fictional author believes that claim.
My own view is very much inspired by these two accounts of fiction, but it differs from each of them in important respects. However, the point of this entry is not to argue against Walton’s and Currie’s accounts, though both accounts face some problem cases that they struggle to explain (See e.g., Walton 1990, 161-9; Matravers 1995, 121-2; Byrne 1993, 29). Rather, I want to suggest a new way of understanding fiction that preserves what I take to be the core insights of these accounts, one that centers on the idea that fictions are instructions for make-believe.
If we understand fictions as instructions for make-believe, then there is a natural answer for what is true in fiction. As a first pass, we might say: a claim is true in a fiction just in case the fiction contains the author’s instructions to make-believe that claim.
But this is not quite right, for it raises an obvious question: how do we determine what a fictional work instructs us to make-believe?
This is where the analogy with ordinary communication comes in handy. Giving and receiving instructions is a form of communication, and all communication depends on some mutually shared assumptions about the competence and cooperativeness of the speaker, or in this case, the author. This is an important insight from Paul Grice (1989). When I ask you where I can get water, and you tell me there is a gas station nearby, I take you to communicate that the gas station sells water. Why do I get to think that? Because I assume that you are trying to provide a truthful and relevant answer to my question. In other words, I have to be charitable in interpreting you. But I can’t be too charitable. If you say, “The King of France is visiting England,” I can’t reasonably interpret you as saying “The president of the United States is visiting England” just because there is no King of France. In interpreting a speaker, I must keep a balance between charitability and reasonableness.
Similarly, when I interpret a work of fiction, I have to keep that same kind of balance. I have to be reasonable: if I see a person get shot in the head in a movie, I can’t simply erase that event from the fiction, even if I think that is a bad plot. But I also have to be charitable: if the camera focuses on a vase for an unusually long period of time, for example, I should infer that it’s intentional—perhaps that the vase will play an important role later—and not just a careless mistake. So we can make our previous formulation of truth in fiction a bit more precise. Let’s say that a claim is true in a fiction just in case we can reasonably and charitably interpret that fiction as containing the author’s instruction to make-believe that claim.
So like Walton, I take the activity central to fictional engagement to be imagination, or make-believe, and I agree with his basic idea that what is true in fiction is, roughly speaking, what is to be make-believed; but unlike Walton, I take fictions to play the role of instructions, rather than that of props, in directing our make-believe. Like Currie, I take fictional engagement to be a collaborative activity governed by shared assumptions, conventions, and norms; but unlike Currie, I take the collaboration to be taking place between the audience and a real author, rather than a fictional author. The biggest difference between my account and theirs is the role of the real author. Walton and Currie place very little importance on the real author, whereas for me the real author’s role is central to explaining our engagement with fiction, including our interpretation of what is truth in fiction.
Authorial Authority
The role of the real author matters because it allows us to think about authorial authority over our imaginative activity. Generally, we take the author of a fiction to have authority over the story: they get to decide what is true in the fiction. But what explains that authority?
On my view, the author’s authority comes from their role as instructor. When I choose to cook according to a recipe, I am prepared to do whatever the recipe says to do; similarly, when I choose to consume a work of fiction, I am prepared to imagine whatever the author instructs me to imagine. And why do I choose to do that in the first place? Presumably it’s because I think the recipe will allow me to make a nice dish, and that a work of fiction will give me an engaging and valuable imaginative experience.
Such a presumption can also be challenged in various ways. Suppose the recipe says to boil the pasta for an hour. Most of us would probably hesitate and reconsider whether to follow this recipe. When an instructor turns out to be bad at their job, they lose their authority. The same should apply to fiction. If the author instructs me to imagine a square that is also a circle, for example, I might wonder whether the author is competent enough to guide me in imagination. As a result, I might ignore this particular piece of instruction, or even more likely, be taken out of the fiction altogether. In this way, the author can lose their authorial authority.
This helps to explain the phenomenon of imaginative resistance (Weatherson 2004; Nanay, 2010; Liao, 2016; among others), where an author fails to make certain things true, despite clearly intending to do so. But that is the topic for another day.
References
Byrne, Alex, 1993, “Truth in Fiction: The Story Continued”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 71(1): 24–35.
Currie, Gregory, 1990, The Nature of Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Liao, Shen-Yi, 2016, “Imaginative Resistance, Narrative Engagement, Genre”, Res Philosophica, 93(2): 461–482.
Matravers, Derek, 1995, “Beliefs and Fictional Narrators”, Analysis, 55(2): 121–122.
Nanay, Bence, 2010, “Imaginative Resistance and Conversational Implicatures”, The Philosophical Quarterly, 60(240): 586–600.
Walton, Kendall L., 1990, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Weatherson, Brian, 2004, “Morality, Fiction, and Possibility”, Philosophers’ Imprint, 4(3): 1–27.