William asks: "As a philosopher, why do you tend to reduce all questions to an either/or opposition? What happened to nuance? Are all philosophical questions either round holes or square holes? Don't philosophers try to square the circle at all, ever? And if so, don't they show how false oppositions morph into greater complexities?"
Philosophers, like scientists (including neurologists), historians, musicologists, and any reasonable thinker, try to discern distinctions if they are there. Most of us see/feel a "real" distinction between totally imaginary stories and factual statements. I was suggesting that if you maintain all stories are "fiction", you would be obliterating a very useful distinction. It would imply that there's no distinction between lying and telling the truth -- it's all fiction anyway. It's dismaying that I have to talk you into believing that seeing real distinctions is useful, that not all of it is destructive philosophical pettifoggery. For example, I asked if in your view a fairy tale and the report that Paul Newman is dead are "equally fiction". You replied: "Not equally. No two events are ever equal." But I didn't ask if the events are equal. I asked if they are, in your view "equally fiction". Take two crime novels -- one about a robbery, one about a murder. You could claim both crimes are equally fictional without claiming the two crimes are equal, or that the two novels are equal. One could claim two noises are equally loud without implying the two noises are otherwise the same. If you can't see the distinction I claim is there, we're in trouble. More to the point, you don't appear to see a distinction between an acceptable factual story and one that's entirely made up. In recent years, several news reporters have been disgraced and fired for filing stories as factual but that were finally determined to be fiction. You don't recognize the distinction. The recent alleged holocaust memoir, "Angel at the Fence" by Herman Rosenblat, has been withdrawn by the publisher because some of the statements in it were found to be to be "fiction". You evidently don't accept any distinction between "fiction" and "truth". People like me -- and we don't have to be philosophers to take this view -- claim that it is indeed a question of either/or: EITHER Rosenblat did meet the girl at the concentration camp fence OR he did not. EITHER Rosenblat's description of those fence encounters is fiction OR it is non-fiction. Your position is "All stories are based on memory. All memories are fiction." 'All X are Y, and all Y are Z' entails that all X are Z. Ergo all stories are fiction. I can't believe you don't see a distinction between a lie and truth, so I asked what word you use to express that distinction, given you extremely unusual usage of the word 'fiction'. ************** New year...new news. Be the first to know what is making headlines. (http://www.aol.com/?ncid=emlcntaolcom00000026)
