The cognitive value of philosophical fiction

234 Pages·2014·1.787 MB·English

by  Mikkonen, Jukka

The Cognitive Value of
Philosophical Fiction
Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy
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The Cognitive Value of
Philosophical Fiction
Jukka Mikkonen
LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY
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First published 2013
© Jukka Mikkonen, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
Jukka Mikkonen has asserted his/her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining
from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-4411-2363-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mikkonen, Jukka.
The cognitive value of philosophical fiction / Jukka Mikkonen.
p. cm. -- (Bloomsbury studies in philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references (p.000) and index.
ISBN 978-1-4411-5400-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4411-2970-3 (epub : alk.
paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4411-2363-3 (ebook pdf) 1. Fiction--History and criticism. 2. Philosophy
in literature. 3. Literature--Philosophy. I. Title.
PN3347.M55 2013
809.3'9384--dc23
2012029274
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
The perennial debate 1
Literature and fiction 2
Philosophy and literature 3
Cognition, knowledge and truth 9
Propositional theory of literary truth 12
1 Fictive Use of Language 15
Fiction as negative discourse 15
Fiction and imagination 23
Literary fiction-making 38
2 Literature and Truth 45
Assertions 46
Suggestions 73
Literature and argumentation 82
Contemplation and hypotheses 92
3 Meaning and Interpretation 99
Authors and communication 99
Intentions, intentionalisms and interpretations 110
Literary works as utterances and artworks 127
Concluding Remarks 137
Summary 137
Epilogue: The grey zone 138
Notes 143
Bibliography 199
Index 223

Acknowledgements
I want to express my deepest appreciation and gratitude to five people without
whom this study would not have been accomplished. Leila Haaparanta has
provided me invaluable advice and greatly clarified my fuzzy thoughts over the
years; Sami Pihlström has given me valuable remarks and support especially at
the beginning of my work; Päivi Mehtonen has worked both as a midwife for
and a great critic of my views; from Arto Haapala I have learnt that rigour is
the greatest virtue in philosophy and that one should always prefer reason and
argument over intellectual trends currently in fashion; Timo Kaitaro has given
me dozens of truly insightful comments concerning literary works of art. All in
all I have had the best imaginable commentators, and any flaws and mistakes in
this study are only due to my own stubbornness and thick-headedness.
There are dozens of scholars to whom I am thankful for correspondence,
comments and discussion. A few of those whose remarks have been extremely
helpful are Noël Carroll, Gregory Currie, John Gibson, James Hamilton, Eileen
John, Peter Lamarque, Stein Haugom Olsen, Anders Pettersson, Kathleen Stock,
Kendall L. Walton and Martin Warner.
This book is dedicated to Kerttu and Pieti.
*
Parts of the study have been drawn or extended from previously published
material of mine. These publications are ‘Philosophical Fiction and the Act
of Fiction-Making’, SATS: Nordic Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2008);
‘Intentions and Interpretations: Philosophical Fiction as Conversation’,
Contemporary Aesthetics, Vol. 7 (2009); ‘The Realistic Fallacy, or: The Conception
of Literary Narrative Fiction in Analytic Aesthetics’, Studia Philosophica
Estonica, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2009); ‘Assertions in Literary Fiction’, Minerva, Vol. 13
(2009); ‘Truth-Claiming in Fiction: Towards a Poetics of Literary Assertion’, The
Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 38 (2009); ‘Literary Fictions as Utterances and
Artworks’, Theoria, Vol. 76, No. 1 (2010); ‘Sutrop on Literary Fiction-Making:
Defending Currie’, Disputatio, Vol. III, No. 28 (2010); ‘On the Body of Literary
Persuasion’, Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 47, No. 1
viii Acknowledgements
(2010); ‘Contemplation and Hypotheses in Literature’, Philosophical Frontiers,
Vol. 5, No. 1 (2010). I would like to thank the above journals for permissions to
reprint material published in them.
Otava
July 2012
Introduction
The perennial debate
In philosophical aesthetics, the question on the relation between literature and
knowledge is perhaps the oldest. Even for Plato’s Socrates, the quarrel between
poets and philosophers was ‘ancient’.1 Philosophers’ views on the cognitive value
of literature, that is, whether literary works may provide knowledge of a significant
kind, may be roughly divided into two categories: for and against, mostly against.
Unsurprisingly, both views got their fundamental formulations already in Antiquity.
On one side, there is Plato, who saw poets as philosophers’ competitors on the
journey to truth. Plato’s hostile view of poetry, most notably expressed in the tenth
book of The Republic, concerned mainly the source of poets’ knowledge. As Plato
saw it, poets imitate actual world objects which he considered imperfect copies of
ideas, and hence they do not depict the essential but merely copy the accidental.2
Furthermore, Plato argued that the creative act in poetry was not a rational enter-
prise, but that poets compose their works under an irrational, divine inspiration.3
On the other side, there is Aristotle, who considered poetry a cognitively valuable
practice. In a well-known passage in the Poetics he maintained that poetry is a source
of information concerning possibilities. As Aristotle put it, ‘the function of the poet
is not to say what has happened, but to say the kind of thing that would happen, i.e.
what is possible in accordance with probability or necessity’.4 According to him, the
difference between works of history and works of poetry is not syntactic but that ‘the
one says what has happened, the other the kind of thing that would happen’.5 For this
reason, Aristotle argued that poetry ‘is more philosophical and more serious than
history’: poetry tends to express universals, and history particulars.6
In the history of philosophy, discussion on the relation between literature
and knowledge has nevertheless often been superficial. Peter Lamarque and