Papers on learning from fiction
Does fiction make us less empathic?
Title: Does fiction make us less empathic?
Publication: Teorema. 35: 47-68
Date: 2016
Link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44077411
Abstract: It is said that certain kinds of fictions have the capacity to enhance our empathic powers. I offer three contributions to this debate. First, the evidence for this claim is poor. Secondly, it is important to distinguish a capacity on the part of fiction to encourage empathic responding and a capacity to enhance our rational control of empathy. Finally, I suggest a number of ways in which fiction may discourage empathy or the prosocial behaviour we expect empathy to provoke; I examine one of these ways in some detail.
Truth and trust in fiction
Title: Truth and trust in fiction
Author: Joint author with Anna Ichino
Publication: Sullivan-Bissett, E., Bradley, H. & Noordhof, P. (eds.) Art and Belief, Oxford: Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 63-82
Date: 2017
Link: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/art-and-belief-9780198805403?cc=gb&lang=en&
Abstract: This chapter examines two pathways through which fictions may affect beliefs: by invading readers’ cognitive systems via heuristics and other sub-rational devices, and by expressing authorial beliefs that readers take to be reliable. Focusing mostly on the latter pathway, the chapter distinguishes fiction as a mechanism for the transmission of uncontroversial factual information from fiction as a means of expressing distinctive perspectives on evaluative propositions. In both cases, the inferences on which readers rely are precarious, and especially so with evaluative cases where there is little hope of independent verification. Moreover, trust, which in other contexts can increase the reliability of beliefs transmitted from person to person, cannot be much depended on when it comes to belief transmission from author to reader.
An error concerning noses
Title: An error concerning noses
Author: Joint author with Jerrold Levinson
Publication: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, volume 75, issue 1, pages 9–13
Date: 8 February 2017
Link: https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12333
Abstract: We identify a strategy for getting beliefs from fiction via three assumptions: (1) a certain causal generality holds in the fiction, and does so because (2) causal generalities in fiction are (with noted exceptions) carried over from what the author takes to be fact; (3) the author is reliable on this topic, so what the author takes to be fact is fact. We do not question (2). While (3) will, in particular cases, be doubtful, the strategy is vulnerable more generally to the worry that what looks like a causal generality may be instead an authorial intervention of a kind from which no causal connection can be inferred; in such cases (1) turns out to be false though it may seem at first sight to be true. In consequence we have extra reason for being careful in forming beliefs based on fictions.
Models as fictions, fictions as models
Title: Models as fictions, fictions as models
Publication; The Monist. 99: 296-310
Date: 2016
Link: https://academic.oup.com/monist/article-abstract/99/3/296/2563568?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Abstract: Thinking of models in science as fictions is said to be helpful, not merely because models are known or assumed to be false, but because work on the nature of fiction helps us understand what models are and how they work. I am unpersuaded. For example, instead of trying to assimilate truth-in-a model to truth-in-fiction we do better to see both as special and separate cases of the more general notion truth-according-to-a-corpus. Does enlightenment go the other way? Do we better understand fiction’s capacity to generate knowledge by thinking of it as a kind of modelling? If we see, as we should, fictions and models are parts of larger patterns of cognitive activity that include institutional frameworks, the best answer is no.
Creativity and the insight that literature brings
Title: Creativity and the insight that literature brings
Publication: S. B. Kaufman and E. S. Paul (eds) The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays, Oxford University Press. pp. 39-61
Date: 2014
Link: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-philosophy-of-creativity-9780199836963?cc=gb&lang=en&
Abstract: One outcome of the exercise of creative literary talent is said to be insight into the workings of the mind. Many advocates of this view write as if its truth were self-evident. I suggest that it is not, that indeed there is little evidence in its favor, and I consider how the claim might be tested. Recent experimental studies by Oatley and colleagues look promising in this regard; I suggest that their results so far provide very weak evidence at best. In the absence of better evidence, I turn to the question of whether there are aspects of literary creativity that we should expect, on general grounds, would lead reliably to insight about the mind. I consider two such aspects: the institutions of literary production and the psychology of literary creativity. I suggest that in both cases, there are some grounds for thinking that literary creativity is not reliably connected with the production of insight.
