Imagining fictional contradictions
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Imagining fictional contradictions Michel-Antoine Xhignesse1 Received: 12 June 2020 / Accepted: 20 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract It is widely believed, among philosophers of literature, that imagining contradictions is as easy as telling or reading a story with contradictory content. Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight (1962), for instance, concerns a knight who performs many brave deeds, but who does not exist. Anything at all, they argue, can be true in a story, including contradictions and other impossibilia. While most will readily concede that we cannot objectually imagine contradictions, they nevertheless insist that we can propositionally imagine them, and regularly do, simply by entertaining a text which prompts us to do so. I argue that this narrative does not bear scrutiny for two main reasons. First, because propositional imagining is beside the point, where truth in fiction is concerned; evaluating truth in fiction engages the cognitive architecture in ways that prohibit the mobilization of merely propositional imagination to that end. And second, because it is not obvious, given the strategies usually suggested, that we ever propositionally imagine contradictions in the first place—in fact, it seems we go out of our way to avoid directly imagining them. Keywords Imagination · Impossibility · Contradiction · Propositional imagining · Objectual imagining · Occurrent reading · Reflective reading · Fiction · Literature · Truth in fiction
1 Lest I be accused of having an over-active imagination, the rompo is a creature from African and Indian legend (but possibly a reference to the porcupine).
Special thanks are due to Emily Robertson, whose perspicacious question about the role of imagination in occurrent versus reflective reading spurred me to write this paper. I hope this goes some way towards answering your question.
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Michel-Antoine Xhignesse [email protected] Department of Philosophy, Capilano University, Fir 404, 2055 Purcell Way, North Vancouver, BC V7J 3H5, Canada
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Synthese
1 Introduction Imagine a rompo by a waterfall.1 No? I can’t, either. The best I can do, with some effort, is to imagine a shadowy creature romping around at the base of a waterfall (the waterfall is the easy bit). Now imagine a creature with a hare’s head but human ears, a horse’s mane and a skeletal body, badger arms and bear legs, and imagine it by the waterfall from before. Oh, and bear in mind that it feeds on human corpses. Armed with all that information, we can do a much better job of imagining our rompo—although again, with some effort, since—if you’re at all like me—we have to spend a little time remembering which parts go where. One last time: imagine a unicorn rearing to fend off a dragon. Presumably, you had no trouble picturing a magical horned horse standing on its hind legs facing a winged (and legged?) fire-breathing serpent, and extrapolating from there. My horse was white, and my serpent green; I suspect yours were, too. It is striking—though hardly surprising—tha
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