Recent philosophy and the fiction/non-fiction distinction
Date | 03 April 2018 |
Pages | 93-96 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/CC-07-2017-0031 |
Published date | 03 April 2018 |
Author | Derek Matravers |
Subject Matter | Library & information science,Collection building & management |
Recent philosophy and the fiction/
non-fiction distinction
Derek Matravers
Department of Philosophy, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of recent philosophical argument concerning the distinction between fiction and
non-fiction.
Design/methodology/approach –A critical view of the literature.
Findings –A consensus that had emerged that defined fiction in terms of the imagination, and imagination in terms of its functional role, has
recently been questioned.
Research limitations/implications –The overview was written by a contributor to the field, and so may be considered partial.
Practical implications –There might be some implications regarding the ways books are classified.
Originality/value –The paper is not original, in that it puts forward points made elsewhere, however it is a completely up-to-date review of t he
field.
Keywords Aesthetics, Kendall Walton, Paradox of fiction, Peter Lamarque, Philosophy of fiction, Philosophy of literature
Paper type Research paper
Perhaps oddly, for a disciplinethat thinks of itself as engaging in
the disinterested pursuit of truth, philosophy is a fairly
Balkanized subject. Even within the Anglophone world, one
can distinguish different hostile camps. In particular, there is
“analytic philosophy”and “continental philosophy”–neither
name being particularly appropriate to what it describes. Each
school is best understood through its tradition. Analytic
philosophy finds its legacy in Locke and Hume of the
eighteenth century, through the Logical Positivists in the early
twentieth, to philosophers such as David Lewis and David
Armstrong. Continental philosophy has streams that come
from post-Kantian German philosophy, as well as modern
French philosophy. Quite what the difference is between these
two schools, and whether or not it matters much, are
tendentious matters. Broadly, within the Anglophone world
(and others, such as Scandinavia) analytic philosophy
dominates philosophy departments, but philosophy that is
done in other departments such as Art History and English,
tends to be continental. Hence, it is no surprise to find that
continental philosophy and literature move in step –the
classification of works under labels such as Romanticism,
Modernism and Post-Modernismbeing common to them both
(Kearney and Rasmussen,2001).
What is more surprising is that, for the past 30 years, there
has been a flourishing interest withinanalytic philosophy in the
philosophy of literature. The key moment was the publication,
in 1990, of Mimesis as Make-Believe by the American
philosopher, Walton (1990).This 450-page book attempted to
provide a comprehensive and unified account of the
representational arts. Walton attempted to ground
representation in “make-believe”. The insight is this. What is
common across the arts is that somethingin the actual world is
presented as something else in “the artworld”. Sounds in the
actual world are notes in the musical world; shaped lumps of
stone in the actual world are kings and queens in the sculpture
world; paint-smearedcanvasses in the actual world are views of
Delft in the picture world; sentences on a page in the actual
world are assertions in the fictional world; and so on. What is
the nature of this transformation? What is the relation, in each
case, between the former and the latter?
For Walton, in each case the thing in the actual world
mandates us to imagine, of it, that it is something else in the
fictional world. That is, representation (or the artworld) is
analogous to children’s game of make-believe. In a game of
mud-pies, there being a glob of mud mandates the participant
to imagine, of that glob of mud,that it is a pie. That is just what
it is to play mud pies. Similarly, faced with a shaped lump of
stone, we are mandatedto imagine, of that lump of stone, that it
is Henry VIII (or whoever).
From this apparently simple idea, Walton wove a dazzling
account that purported to solve the principal problems
surrounding representation that had been bothering
philosophers. It was received with great acclaim and has
dominated discussion of representation in analytic philosophy
of art ever since. To come down to the topic of this paper, the
second chapter of the book was called “Fiction and
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on
Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/2514-9326.htm
Collection and Curation
37/2 (2018) 93–96
© Emerald Publishing Limited [ISSN 2514-9326]
[DOI 10.1108/CC-07-2017-0031]
The author is grateful to the editor for his comments on a draft of this
paper.
Received 31 July 2017
Revised 31 July 2017
Accepted 11 September 2017
93
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