Patchwork Puzzles and the Nature of Fiction

PATCHWORK PUZZLES AND THE NATURE OF FICTION PATRIK ENGISCH Kathleen Stock has recently argued that Gregory Currie’s account of fiction is beset by two patchwork puzzles. According to the first, Currie’s account entails that works of fiction end up being implausible heterogenous complexes of utterances that furnish a fictional world and utterances that aim at representing the actual world. According to the second, competent engagement with a fiction can implausibly result in switching from one mental attitude to another – namely, belief and make-belief. In this paper, I argue for two main claims. First, that a few alterations to Currie’s account make it immune to Stock’s puzzles. And, second, that such a modified account presents clear advantages over the alternative one offered by Stock. I. INTRODUCTION Kathleen Stock recently argued that Gregory Currie’s influential account of the nature of fiction was plagued by so-called ‘patchwork puzzles’.1She then uses the existence of such puzzles to motivate the introduction of her own account of the nature of fiction. In this paper, I take as my starting point Stock’s formulation of these puzzles and offer to recast Currie’s account in a way that avoids their emergence. I then discuss Stock’s own alternative and argue that my recasting of Currie’s account fares better than her proposal. The plan is the following. In the first section (II), I introduce Currie’s account of fiction as well the patchwork puzzles which Stock claims plague it. In the second section (III), I amend Currie’s initial account and dissolve Stock’s patchwork puzzles. In the third, and last, section (IV), I engage critically with Stock and argue that my version of Currie’s account should be preferred over her own account of the nature of fiction. II. PATCHWORK PUZZLES Two notions fundamental to the philosophy of fiction are a fictional work, such as Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, and the constituents (for example, sentences, propositions, or utterances) of such a work. Plausibly, a relation of conceptual fundamentality of some sort obtains between these two notions. This Patchwork Puzzles and the Nature of Fiction For their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, I thank Tobias Klauk, Niels Klenner, Julia Langkau, Kathleen Stock, Cain Todd, Alberto Voltolini, Manuel GarcíaCarpintero, the audience of the EXRE 2018 autumn school in Champex, and an anonymous referee. Work on this paper was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, Grant No. 100012L_166619 / 1. 1Kathleen Stock, ‘Fictive Utterance and Imagining’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 85 (2011): 145–61. 28 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 28–47 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 28 intuition, however, can takeone of two different forms, a top-down or a bottomup form, giving rise to two different kinds of theories of fiction. On the one hand, one might believe that the notion of a fictional work is more fundamental than the notion of a constituent of a fictional work and submit that we can define the latter in terms of the former. Imagine that one is willing to defend a purely institutional theory of fiction. Accordingly, whether a work Wis fictional would be determined by a certain ‘fiction-determining institution’. Were the status attributed, it would then be possible to treat, derivatively, the constituents of Was the ones of a work of fiction. Many scholars believe, however, that the fundamentality relation goes in the other direction – namely, that what makes a work Wfictional is that it contains constituents of a particular sort – fictional ones – such that, first, our grasp on their nature is independent of our grasp on the notion of a fictional work and, second, the fictional character of a work can be accounted for in terms of its having such constituents. In this paper, I will focus entirely on the latter, bottomup, kind of strategy. A very popular bottom-up strategy is the one offered by Gregory Currie.2 The central thesis of his theory is that fictions are acts through which an author intends to communicate with an audience with a specific aim. As he puts it: Fiction […] is the product of a communicative act […] In performing such a communicative act, the author attempts to elicit a certain response from his audience; the desired response is that the audience make believe the story told by the author. The reader of fiction is invited by the author to engage in a game of make-believe, the structure of the game being in part dictated by the text of the author’s work.3 In other words, Currie frames his theory as an extension of a Gricean theory of communicative acts, that is, intentional actions through which speakers intend to communicate something to an audience, by means of identifying the communicative act proper to fiction: a reflexive intention that an audience makebelieves the content conveyed by the act. The key to such a theory of fiction is the notion of a fictive utterance. An utterance is fictive just in case an author produces it with the reflexive intention that her audience should, as a result of having identified this intention, makebelieve its content. But, according to Currie, though all works of fiction are issued by means of fictive utterances, not all fictive utterances result in the production of fiction. An additional sufficiency condition must be deployed. 2Gregory Currie, The Nature of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 3Ibid., 70. Patrik Engisch Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 0–00 29 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 29 Currie drives home this point by means of a series of thought experiments, the most telling being the following. An author, Smith, intends to produce a work of fiction. As a result, she produces what she takes to be genuine and faithful fictive utterances, that is, utterances whose contents she prescribes her audience to make-believe. But, unbeknownst to Smith, the content of her fictive utterances are true propositions about her life which she has psychologically repressed. In other words, she mandates her audience to make-believe contents that truly report events of her life. This fact, Currie says, prevents Smith’s work from being a piece of fiction because fiction does not amount merely to that which is the product of a fictive utterance but to that which is the product of a fictive utterance and for which make-believe can be correctly prescribed. The content of Smith’s work fails to meet the second condition. Insofar as the content of Smith’s fictive utterances truly report events of Smith’s life, makebelieve falls short of being the correct attitude one should take towards them. What exactly should be added to a fictive utterance for its content to be a genuine candidate for fiction? For Currie, truth does not constitute the real matter and, hence, the reason for which Smith’s work fails to be a fiction is not merely that its content is true. Rather, the problem is the kind of relation that Smith’s story entertains with truth – namely, it is not only true but also nonaccidentally so. The notion of non-accidental truth supplies the success conditions for fictive utterances. According to Currie, a hypothetical author could write a piece of fiction and, out of pure luck, its content could turn out to be entirely true. Such a case would still count as fiction, Currie claims, since the facts of which the fiction is true play no role in the author having produced a work of fiction with exactly that content. It is very different, says Currie, if the truth of content that pretends to be fictional is non-accidental. Indeed, in such a case, the world itself reliably supplies the work with its content and, as such, the content of the work cannot be correctly prescribed for make-believe. From the notion of a fictive utterance and this second clause of non-accidental truth, Currie is able to define a second notion, fictional statement.4A fictional statement is a fictive utterance whose content is at most accidentally true. Currie regards such contents as the genuine units of fiction and, incidentally, it is the fact that Smith’s work lacks such fictional statements that explains its failure to be fictional. We now have a pair of notions, fictive utterance and fictional statement. Together, however, they are not yet sufficient to shed light on the distinction Patchwork Puzzles and the Nature of Fiction 4Ibid., 49. 30 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 0–00 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 30 between fictional and non-fictional works. A legitimate demand on Currie’s theory is that it should manage to go beyond that micro-level to deliver us an account of fictional and non-fictional works. According to Currie, there exists a path to the macro-level since a fictional work can be defined as that which contains a sufficient number of fictional statements. By contrast, a non-fictional work is one that contains none, or not enough. As he puts it: We can say that a work as a whole is fiction if it contains statements that satisfy the conditions of fictionality I have presented, conditions we can sum up briefly by saying that a statement is fiction if and only if it is the product of an act of fiction-making […] and is no more than accidentally true.5 Many have agreed that an account along these lines represents a big step torwards the aim of providing a workable theory of fiction. However, it must face a problem which can be expressed as the incompatibility of two theses. The first I shall call the Homogeneity Thesis (HOT): Homogeneity Thesis: works of fiction are homogeneous in the sense that the constituents of the fictional content of a work of fiction are all of a same kind. This formulation needs unpacking in order to avoid misunderstandings. First, note that HOT is about fictional content, that is, what is true in a fiction. In other words, it merely claims that if something is a constituent of the fictional content Cof a work W, then that thing must share a same nature, so to speak, with the other constituents of C– and, presumably, one that goes beyond the somewhat trivial, unenlightening sharing of the property of being a constituent of C. Second, HOT being restricted to fictional content makes it compatible with two important facts about works of fiction. The first fact is that, as many have claimed and as we shall see below, some fictional truths can also be simultaneously genuinely asserted. This fact doesn’t threaten HOT since its proponent can maintain that, on the whole, the constituents of the fictional content Cof work Ware on a par qua constituents of Cwhile agreeing that some of these constituents can also be genuinely asserted by W. What HOT is committed to is the claim that the fictional content C of a work Wcannot turn out to be the conjunction of two disjoint sets of utterances: those that are true in Wand those that are genuinely asserted by W. The second fact is that a work of fiction as a whole can be composed of more things than fictional truths, for instance authorial intrusions such as the following 5Ibid. Patrik Engisch Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 0–00 31 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 31 passage in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: ‘A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play; and when I draw up the curtain this time, reader, you must fancy you see a room […].’ Again, this neither threatens HOT insofar as it is restricted to the fictional content of a work of fiction, not its entire content. The second thesis I shall call the Heterogeneity Thesis (HET): Heterogeneity Thesis: Fictions may be heterogeneous entities in the sense that their fictional content can be composed of two different kinds of utterances, fictive and non-fictive ones. As should be obvious, HOT and HET are incompatible. Indeed, contrary to what HOT is committed to, HET claims that the fictional content of a fiction can be a patchwork of two different kinds of utterances, fictive and non-fictive ones and, hence, it is possibly non-homogeneous.6 An account such as Currie’s is wedded to HET. Indeed, as a result of introducing the notion of fictive utterance in the way he does, Currie opens up the possibility that most works of fiction are patchworks of fictive and non-fictive utterances. As he puts it: ‘A work of fiction is a patchwork of truth and falsity, reliability and unreliability, fiction-making and assertion.’7Some scholars have argued, however, that this consequence is problematic and threatens the plausibility not only of Currie’s account but of any bottom-up theory of fiction wedded to HET. Stock, for instance, writes: Yet it does not follow from the adoption of this [bottom-up] strategy that, other things being equal, we should happily accept a theory which entails that fictions standardly contain significant numbers of non-fictive utterances. I will assume that, where two otherwise equally plausible theories of fictive utterances have different consequences for the numbers of non-fictive utterances typically allowed as present in a fictional work, the one which posits fewer it better than the one which posits more of them.8 Stock provides two reasons for her concern. First, she insists that we need to give a homogeneous treatment of the activity of writing fiction and that HET forces us to conceive it as a split between two distinct tasks: writing fictive utterances and writing non-fictive ones. As she puts it, not trying to diminish the amount of fictive utterances a work contains ‘is to accept an uncomfortable split in an author’s otherwise apparently homogeneous activity: now she produces one kind Patchwork Puzzles and the Nature of Fiction 6I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify HOT and HET and for supplying the Brontë example. 7Currie, Nature of Fiction, 49. 8Stock, ‘Fictive Utterance and Imagining’, 145. 32 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 0–00 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 32 of utterance, now she produces the other, yet both serve to furnish a fictional world, somehow.’9In other words, Currie’s account forces us to see the production of utterances which aims at depicting the real world and the production of fictive utterances as two activities distinct in kind which somehow achieve the same goal, the furnishing of a fictional world. This, however, creates an ‘uncomfortable split in an author’s otherwise apparently homogeneous activity’. The idea amounts to the following. When an author is crafting a fictional world, she does not take her activity to be composed of two distinct sub-kinds of activity: first, crafting fictive utterances and, second, crafting non-fictive ones. On the contrary, her activity amounts to the seamless crafting of a work of fiction by multiplying fictive utterances. Yet, though the question of how fictive utterances can furnish fictional worlds is rather straightforward, Currie leaves us in the dark as how nonfictive utterances can perform the same task. How can the production of both kinds of utterance collaborate to furnish a fictional world? Following Stock, I shall refer to this as the first patchwork puzzle of fiction. Her second reason arises out of what we may call an attitudinal ascent from utterances to the attitudes they prescribe. Indeed, as we have seen, a central pillar of Currie’s bottom-up strategy is that fictive and non-fictive utterances prescribe different attitudes – one of make-believe and one of belief, respectively. Hence, if fictional works are indeed patchworks of fictive and non-fictive utterances, then correct engagement with them may result in a patchwork of attitudes: some bits of the work we end up make-believing while other bits we end up believing. Stock remarks, however, that this constitutes an implausible description of our engagement with works of fiction. Though we might end up believing propositions as a result of engaging with works of fiction, a plausible account of our engaging with them should account for the fact that we seem to be taking a uniform attitude towards any proposition true in the world of a work of fiction, whether really true or not. As she puts it: At best [Currie’s account] leaves a problematic gap in our understanding of the practice of reading fiction, since, one assumes, a difference in kind of utterance demands a difference in response; yet if this is so, not only are we unclear what those prescribed responses are, exactly, but we are unsure how they are supposed to interact. It would be to a theory’s advantage if this slightly schizophrenic picture of fictional works could be avoided.10 Following Stock again, I shall refer to this as the second patchwork puzzle of fiction. 9Ibid., 146. 10 Ibid. Patrik Engisch Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 0–00 33 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 33 As we shall see below, Stock not only identifies these puzzles, but she also sets to dissolve them. But, in the next section, I shall provide an alternative way to get rid of these puzzles, closer to the spirit of Currie’s original account. At a later stage, I shall explain why my recasting of Currie’s account should be preferred over Stock’s new proposal. III. DISSOLVING THE PUZZLES The two puzzles discussed in the previous section demonstrate that there is a tension between the different bits of Currie’s account. In this section, I dissolve the puzzles while preserving the spirit, if not the letter, of Currie’s account. I proceed as follows. First, I identify a set of reasons that I claim explain why Currie framed his theory in this way. Second, I locate precisely the source of the puzzles in Currie’s account and propose a way to get rid of them. Third, I evaluate my account with respect to the reasons identified at step one. Three main reasons may be given to explain the shape of Currie’s theory. At the most general level is the claim, argued by elimination, that a pragmatic account constitutes the best way to formulate a theory of fiction. Of course, this only explains the most general features of the account and not Currie’s reason for his endorsement of HET, which, as we have seen, is at the source of the existence of the patchwork puzzles. We need two further elements to provide a my explanation. First, he endorses the allegedly bedrock claim that a fiction must contain at least some utterances whose contents are made up. We deem it bedrock because it is hard to imagine how one could argue in favour of the claim that this is genuinely a part of the concept of fiction. The best one can do is to point to a certain practice of classifying works along these lines and reveal one’s intention to carve out a notion of fiction which takes this fact into account. As we have seen, Currie’s own version of this intuition is that a fiction must contain at least some fictional statements, that is, fictive utterances whose contents are at most accidentally true. Second, even though the primary function of works of fiction is to be vehicles for fictional truths, they also sometimes communicate truths about the real world. To use an often-quoted example, the opening of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina – ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ – admittedly makes a claim whose range is supposed to cover not only the fictional families depicted in that work, but families in the real world as well. Currie’s own way to deal with this fact is to treat such an utterance as a non-fictive one. In sum, then, Currie’s account can reasonably be seen to offer a theory of fiction that meets three desiderata head on: it is a pragmatic account that provides Patchwork Puzzles and the Nature of Fiction 34 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 0–00 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 34 a satisfactory explanation both for the presence of made-up contents and for the claim that works of fiction can also be vehicles for genuine truths. But the price to pay for such an accommodation is quite high since it cannot avoid endorsing HET. I will propose a way Currie’s account could meet these desiderata for a fairer price. Before turning to this, I first locate more precisely the source of the tension in Currie’s account. In order to do so, I strengthen a bit the case made by Stock by reformulating her worries in the form of an argument. Its conclusion is no doubt stronger than Stock’s initial worries but putting things in this form will turn out to be helpful as a means to structure the subsequent discussion. The strengthened argument from the first puzzle against Currie’s account goes as follows: (1) The activity of the author of a work of fiction is to compose a work of fiction; (2) to compose a work of fiction is to furnish a fictional world; (3) a fictional world can be furnished both by fictive and non-fictive utterances; (4) a fictive utterance aims at furnishing a fictional world; (5) a non-fictive utterance aims at depicting the real world; (6) an utterance that aims at depicting the real world cannot simultaneously furnish a fictional world; (7) hence, whenever the author of a fiction is producing a non-fictive utterance, it cannot be taken as furnishing a fictional world. This argument can be taken as a reductio ad absurdum of Currie’s account. Indeed, authors routinely use what counts for Currie as non-fictive utterances to furnish fictional worlds. Currie’s view, however, makes this fact either impossible (as the above argument has it) or at least quite hard to grasp (as Stock’s own formulation has it). In either case, we cannot rest content with Currie’s account as it stands. I shall assume that this argument is sound. Hence, Currie’s account cannot remain as it stands. But which part exactly should go? Premises (1), (4), and (5) don’t seem to be plausible candidates for rejection, since they come very close to being stipulations. I shall henceforth leave them aside. Premise (2) is equally non-substantial, since the notion of fictional world it appeals to is very minimal and merely elliptically refers to what is true in a fiction. This leaves us with options (3) and (6). At least one of them should go. I will argue that, in fine, both of them are dispensable. Let us start with premise (3). Why think that it is true? Works of fiction can contain both factually true and factually false propositions, and, moreover, can serve as vehicles of both fictional and genuine truths. Under the assumption Patrik Engisch Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 0–00 35 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 35 that we can appeal to only two kinds of utterances, fictive and non-fictive ones, this fact neatly explains the need for the claim that a non-fictive utterance be allowed, in its competence as a non-fictive utterance, also to furnish a fictional work. Indeed, this claim certainly is more plausible than the one that a fictive utterance can aim at depicting the real world. Hence, premise (3) may look bizarre but, for the time being, rejecting it would be even worse, since it would be tantamount to failing to meet the second of Currie’s three desiderata. What about premise (6)? Generally speaking it doesn’t seem impossible for an utterer to use a single utterance to perform more than one communicative act. Take the following case. A firm is hiring and examining candidates. About one of them, an examiner says: ‘He is a hard worker.’ It is a quite mundane claim that making such an utterance can realize more than one communicative act. First, it can convey the examiner’s belief that the candidate is a hard worker and, second, her conviction that there isn’t much more to expect from this candidate than hard work. Why wouldn’t it be the case that the same utterance can both furnish a fictional world and aim at conveying a truth about the real world? As Stock puts it, It is […] possible to have different, non-competing intentions fulfilled by the same utterance. An utterance in code can be intended to convey two distinct true claims, for instance. Likewise, in principle there seems no impediment to a single utterance’s being seriously intended both to say something true and to be recognized as such, and seriously intended to be imagined and recognized as such, simultaneously, assuming that the right sort of context can be generated such that the relevant intentions are communicable by the form and context of the utterance.11 In substance, premise (6) claims that the nature of the utterances that compose a work of fiction are somewhat special in that they cannot convey more than one communicative act: they are either fictive or non-fictive but cannot be both. Following Stock, and pending some important clarifications below, I argue that this claim must be rejected. A single utterance can be both fictive and nonfictive.12 Patchwork Puzzles and the Nature of Fiction 11 Kathleen Stock, Only Imagine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 154. 12 In addition to Stock, several other authors have made the same claim: Stacie Friend, ‘Imagining Fact and Fiction’, in New Waves in Aesthetics, ed. Kathleen Stock and Katherine Thomson Jones (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 150–69; David Davies, ‘Fictionality, Fictive Utterance, and the Assertive Author’, in Mimesis: Metaphysics, Cognition, Pragmatics, ed. Gregory Currie, Petr Koťátko, and Martin Pokorný (London: College Publications, 2012), 61–85; Manuel García-Carpintero, ‘Norms of Fiction-Making’, British Journal of Aesthetics 53 (2013): 339–57; and Alberto Voltolini, ‘The Nature of Fiction/al Utterances’, Kairos 17 (2016): 28–55. For a dissenting view, see John Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 36 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 0–00 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 36 and, consequently, both believe and make-believe that there is beer in the fridge. As long as the aim of the two QMPs are distinct, there is no reason to regard such a combination of attitudes as odd. This fits very well with what is going on in the case of fiction. An author can, by means of writing a single sentence, aim at realizing two intentions: prescribing both believing and make-believing the very same proposition. These prescriptions offer guidance that pertains to two different QMPs on the reader’s side: forming make-believes about the world of the fiction and forming beliefs about the world. If we return to Tolstoy’s example, someone reading the opening sentence of Anna Karenina can, first, make-believe its content as part of an ongoing QMP that aims at finding out what is the case in the world of the fiction; and, second, believe it as part of an ongoing QMP that aims at forming beliefs about families. This also fits well with the phenomenology of engaging with a work of fiction. To engage with a work of fiction is to be immersed in a fictional world. Yet it often happens that elements of a work of fiction strike us as being not only true in the work of fiction but also genuinely true. In such cases, we don’t trade immersion in a fictional world for engagement with the real world. On the contrary, we keep both doors open, so to speak, and add that truth both as a component of our QMP that pertains to the fictional world of the work and to another QMP that pertains to the real world such as, recalling the Tolstoy example, our forming beliefs about the general functioning of families. It is time to sum up the main theses of this section. First, works of fiction are entirely composed of fictive utterances. Hence, there is no puzzle at the level of utterances. Second, since all fictive utterances prescribe make-believe, there is also no puzzle at the level of our engagement with works of fiction: a work of fiction is entirely imagined. But in order to account for the claim that fiction can also be a vehicle of genuine truths, it must be recognized that at least parts of works of fiction can also simultaneously be believed. This is accounted for by the notion of a QMP: one can competently engage with a fiction while both imagining and believing some part of it as long as each attitude is part of a QMP. In the next section, I compare this account to the one recently proposed by Stock, and argue that there are some reasons to prefer the account I have just sketched out. IV. STOCK’S SOLUTION TO THE PUZZLES Having identified the patchwork puzzles, Stock sets out to dissolve them. But her proposal is very different from the one I have just sketched. In this section, I shall offer three reasons to prefer my account over hers. First, I present some doubts Patrik Engisch Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 0–00 43 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 43 about her notion of F-imagining. Second, I argue that her notion of F-imagining fails to be extensionally adequate. And third, I submit that her account creates weird situations which can be avoided by endorsing the alternative I have proposed. Stock characterizes the attitude of F-imagining as follows. First, it is propositional. Second, it is quasi-factive, in other words, it is an attitude that presents its content as being the case and not, contrary to desire, as having to be made the case. Third, it is characterized by two central principles: Connect 1: Necessarily, a thinker Twho imagines that pis disposed to connect her thought that pis the case with other propositional thoughts about what is the case.18 Connect 2: Necessarily, where a thinker Timagines that pat time t, either Tdoes not believe that por Tis disposed to connect her thought that pis the case to some further proposition(s) about what is the case, whose content is not reduplicated by any belief of hers at t.19 What is essential about these two claims is their dispositional nature. That is, to F-imagine that pis to be disposed to do certain things with some propositions whose content one takes as being the case. The first general disposition is that one should be disposed to connect a proposition pthat one imagines to other propositions one is also thinking. This first requirement is pretty weak and seems to apply to any kind of thought, not merely imaginative ones. Generally, to think is to connect thoughts and to engage in inferential activities. Connect 2 is much more substantial since it is supposed to account for the specific dispositional profile of states of imaginings. The idea is as follows. If one F-imagines, either one doesn’t believe that pbut meets the criteria for F-imagining or one does believe that pbut is disposed to connect the content of one’s beliefs to thoughts one does not believe – a functional profile much different from the one of belief, where one should be disposed to connect what one believes only to other thoughts one believes. Take the cup example again. According to Stock, the child F-imagines that the cup is empty in so far as she is disposed, even while believing that the cup is empty, to connect this thought to ones she does not believe, that is, that the cup was full thirty seconds ago. Stock then proposes to define works of fiction in terms of her notion of F-imagining. A work Wis a fiction if, and only if, it is produced by an author with the reflexive intention that its audience should F-imagine its content. As she puts it: ‘A fiction should be understood as a collection of utterances of a certain kind: utterances intended by their author to produce conjoined F-imagining in readers Patchwork Puzzles and the Nature of Fiction 18 Stock, ‘Fictive Utterance and Imagining’, 151. 19 Ibid., 153. 44 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 0–00 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 44 or hearers, in the reflexive way indicative of communication according to Grice.’20 According to Stock, then, to engage with a fiction is to engage with thought patterns that are distinct from our engagement with non-fiction. Indeed, when we read non-fiction, we are not supposed to be disposed to connect what we believe with what we do not believe. For instance, reading Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily, a non-fiction book about the political influence of the Mafia in Southern Italy, one is not supposed to connect the content of this work with, say, the fictional statements contained in Lampedusa’s The Leopard. For instance, one is not supposed to believe the following conjunction: ‘Don Fabrizio lived in this specific part of Palermo and the Mafia real-estate activities have disfigured it.’ Indeed, since Don Fabrizio is a purely fictional character, one cannot genuinely believe anything about him. But reading The Leopard one may reasonably rely on one’s knowledge of the history of Southern Italy to identify some of the implicit fictional content of the work. Hence, reading a fictional work such as The Leopard one can – should, in fact – connect thoughts that one believes with those that one merely imagines. Finally, Stock claims that this is sufficient to dissolve the two patchwork puzzles. First, since we are supposed to F-imagine each utterance contained in a work of fiction and, moreover, since an utterance is fictive only when there is a prescription that we imagine it, then a work of fiction is entirely composed of fictive utterances. Second, the content of fictive utterances can overlap with the content of what one believes, and since to F-imagine is characterized in terms of a disjunctive claim whose second disjunct explicitly mentions that it is possible to believe that pand yet to imagine that p, then the second puzzle also disappears. However, as I shall now suggest, there are good reasons to prefer my account over hers. First, imagine that an author produces a work with the intention that her readership should F-imagine its content though she intentionally does not introduce any content that her readership does not believe. According to Stock, such a scenario would be impossible. Indeed, she stipulates the nature of F-imagining in such a way that one cannot F-imagine only what one believes. But what is the rationale for such a requirement? After all, she spells out the nature of F-imagining in dispositional terms: if one both believes and F-imagines that p, then one should at least be disposed to connect one’s thought that pto other thoughts that one does not believe. But one might well be so disposed without the disposition actually being triggered. In other words, there is a suspicion that this supplementary clause is merely ad hoc. It does not really pertain to the nature 20 Stock, Only Imagine, 150. Patrik Engisch Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 0–00 45 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 45 of F-imagining but, rather, is introduced to prevent the possibility of problematic cases such as the one just described. Second, Stock claims that her notion of F-imagining also provides us with an explanation of what is going on in cases like the cup scenario. Indeed, such a scenario admittedly demonstrates that one can both simultaneously believe and imagine the same proposition. Yet it doesn’t tell us what it is to imagine a proposition that one also believes. A task for philosophy is to clarify conceptually the phenomenon of imagining so as to offer some notion of imagining that is compatible with simultaneously believing what one imagines. And, as we have seen, Stock claims that the notion of F-imagining is up to this task. But here is the rub. The solution only works if the belief remains dispositional. If both dispositions were to be manifested simultaneously, then the child would find herself in an impossible position. On the one hand, as part of the dispositional profile of belief, she would have to be disposed to connect her thought only to what she already believes. On the other, as part of the dispositional profile of F-imagining, she would have to be disposed to connect her thought to other thoughts she doesn’t believe. And, surely, one cannot be both disposed and not disposed to connect what one believes to what one does not believe. But is there a reason to believe that we can simultaneously and occurrently both believe and imagine the same proposition? It is certainly false that two different attitudes, believing that pand imagining that p, can both be at the centre of one’s attention at the same time. However, there is no reason to deny that both can be occurrent though only one can occupy the centre of one’s attention at any one time. For instance, we could well imagine the child reflecting on her situation and thinking: ‘How odd it is that I am currently imagining a proposition I already believe.’ Hence, after all, Stock’s notion of F-imagine is, contrary to my solution, not well suited to describe a case like Leslie’s cup example. Finally, imagine the following case. At a time t, an author writes a work of fiction Fin which two sets of propositions intermingle: S1, containing propositions that everyone believed at time t; S2, containing propositions that no one believed at time t. Yet, at time t+n, beliefs have changed in such a way that everyone both believes the contents of S1 and S2. As a result, at time t+n, readers cannot comply anymore with the author’s intention: whatever they imagine they also believe. How should we treat such works? Is Ffiction at time tbut non-fiction at time t+n? Is it still fiction at time t+n but only if one reads it with the perspective of someone engaging with it at time t? These are weird questions. Moreover, these are questions that pop up only against the background of Stock’s own theory. No one Patchwork Puzzles and the Nature of Fiction 46 Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 0–00 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 46 would, for whatever reason, contest the fictional status of such works. Note also that our Currie-inspired account provides a straightforward answer to the problem. The work would still count as fiction at t+n because its content, if true, would at most be non-accidentally so. On the basis of these three elements, I then conclude that my solution to the patchwork puzzles should be preferred over Stock’s. V. CONCLUSION The aim of this paper was to discuss two patchwork puzzles that Stock claims beset Currie’s theory of fiction. The first puzzle occurs at the level of occurrences, the second at the level of attitude. I started by presenting Currie’s account and then identified precisely the source of the puzzle – namely, the two claims that, first, works of fiction can be furnished both by fictive and non-fictive utterances and, second, that some utterances cannot realize more than one intention. I then identified the reasons that push Currie to make such claims and replaced them with suitable alternative theses. Next, I showed that adopting them is compatible with Currie’s main aims in formulating his theory. As such, my account constitutes a suitable alternative to Currie’s. I then discussed an alternative solution proposed by Stock, before presenting three objections to it, and concluding that there are good reasons to prefer my account to hers. Patrik Engisch Department of German, University of Fribourg, Av. de l’Europe 20, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland [email protected] BIBLIOGRAPHY Currie, Gregory. The Nature of Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Davies, David. ‘Fictionality, Fictive Utterance, and the Assertive Author.’ In Mimesis: Metaphysics, Cognition, Pragmatics, edited by Gregory Currie, Petr Koťátko, and Martin Pokorný, 61–85. London: College Publications, 2012. Friend, Stacie. ‘Imagining Fact and Fiction.’ In New Waves in Aesthetics, edited by Kathleen Stock and Katherine Thomson Jones, 150–69. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. García-Carpintero, Manuel. ‘Norms of Fiction-Making.’ British Journal of Aesthetics 53 (2013): 339–57. Gibson, John. Fiction and The Weave of Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Leslie, Alan M. ‘Pretending and Believing: Issues in the Theory of ToMM.’ Cognition 50 (1994): 211–38. Stock, Kathleen. ‘Fictive Utterance and Imagining.’ Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 85 (2011): 145–61. ––––––. Only Imagine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Voltolini, Alberto. ‘The Nature of Fiction/al Utterances.’ Kairos 17 (2016): 28–55. Patrik Engisch Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LVI/XII, 2019, No. 1, 0–00 47 Zlom1_2019_Sestava 1 5.4.19 8:01 Stránka 47