Dear All
Tomorrow's (3.30 to 5.30, The Refectory) USYD departmental seminar
from Prof Ken Walton (MIchigan) is
"Fictionality and Imagination: Mind the Gap".
Abstract:
Imaginings, unlike beliefs, come in clusters, clusters corresponding
to different fictional worlds. This obvious fact has not been taken
into account sufficiently in recent discussions of the functional
roles of beliefs and imaginings in our cognitive architecture.
Fictionality is relative to clusters—a proposition is fictional in one
fictional world or another. I previously understood a proposition to
be fictional just in case there is a prescription to imagine it: It is
fictional that p, in the world of a given novel or picture, for
instance, just in case appreciators of that work are to imagine that
p. This is mistaken. A variety of interesting examples show that
prescriptions to imagine are necessary but not sufficient for
fictionality.
I am not sure what more is necessary, what it takes to fill the gap
between prescriptions to imagine and fictionality. But whatever it
is, is likely to provide a nice solution to the “seeing-the-unseen”
problem, the worries about cases in which we are to imagine seeing
something which, fictionally, is unseen. In observing Michelangelo’s
Creation we are to imagine seeing the creation, but we are also to
imagine that no one sees it. These imaginings are linked to different
fictional worlds, however, they belong to different clusters; so there
is no conflict between them.
cheers
d
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