Fiction-making as a gricean illocutionary type

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 65, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 203-216

  García Carpintero, Manuel ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA   (Spain)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61049377374     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-594X.2007.00250.x     Document Type: Review

References (47)

1. All references to David Lewis, Gregory Currie, and Kendall Walton that appear throughout this essay are from the following volumes: David Lewis, "Truth in Fiction," in Philosophical Papers (Oxford University Press, 1983), vol. 1, pp. 261-280
2. (a reprint with postscripts of the essay with the same title, originally published in American Philosophical Quarterly 15 [1978]: 37-46), hereafter TF;
3. Gregory Currie, The Nature of Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 1990), hereafter NF;
4. Kendall Walton, Mimesis and Make-Believe (Harvard University Press, 1990), hereafter MM.
5. This story appears courtesy of the heir of Julio Cortázar. It is my own translation of Julio Cortázar, "Continuidad de los Parques," in Cuentos Completos 1 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2001).
6. Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 161. Exceptions include followers of the views by Nelson Goodman, to be mentioned later.
7. Timothy Williamson, "Knowing and Asserting," Philosophical Review 105 (1996): 489-523;
8. included with some revisions as Chapter 11 of his Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford University Press, 2000).
9. defend this version of Williamson's account in my "Assertion and the Semantics of Force-Markers," in The Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction, CSLI Lecture Notes, ed. C. Bianchi (The University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 133-166.
10. M. Beardsley and W. Wimsatt, "The Intentional Fallacy," in their The Verbal Icon (University of Kentucky, 1954), pp. 4, 3.
11. Terence Parsons, Nonexistent Objects (Yale University Press, 1980) is the classical reference for neo-Meinongianism, the contemporary version of the view that there are objects that "have being" but do not exist.
12. Peter van Inwagen, "Creatures of Fiction," American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1977): 299-308. Unlike neo-Meinongians like Parsons, van Inwagen takes creatures of fiction to exist.
13. Amie Thomasson, Fiction and Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 100-105, is a fuller short discussion.
14. I am sympathetic to Edward Zalta's suggestion that his preferred neo-Meinongian account, and the sort of proposal I will be endorsing, can be seen as mere notational variants. See Zalta, "The Road Between Pretense Theory and Abstract Object Theory," in Empty Names, Fiction and the Puzzles of Non-Existence, ed. A. Everett and T. Hofweber (Stanford: CSLI, 2000), pp. 117-147.
15. See John Searle, "The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse," New Literary History 6 (1974),
16. also included in his Expression and Meaning (Cambridge University Press, 1979).
17. 'Common knowledge' is used for the concept introduced by Stephen Schiffer in his Meaning (Oxford University Press, 1972), Lewis, and others so as to provide Gricean analyses of meaning, convention, and related notions.
18. As a matter of fact, this is not so clear, as John F. Phillips correctly points out in his "Truth and Inference in Fiction," Philosophical Studies 94 (1999): 273-293, see pp. 279-281. If we were told as known fact a story like the one in the novel in ACP, we would infer at most that it is probable that the victim is the husband, while when we are told of it in the fiction, we are certain of this. But let us grant it, for the sake of illustrating how (L) is supposed to work. Later I will show how my proposal avoids the difficulty.
19. The problem with Lewis's account of the contents of fictions that our examples (5) and (6) illustrate is, I take it, but a dramatic case of the more general difficulty pointed out by Peter Lamarque, "Logic and Criticism," in his Fictional Points of View (Cornell University Press, 1996); the alternative I suggest below is also in accordance with that diagnosis.
20. See David Velleman, "Narrative Explanation," Philosophical Review 112 (2003): 1-25, for an interesting account of the peculiar explanatory force uniting narratives, and related references.
21. H. P. Grice, "Logic and Conversation," in Studies in the Ways of Words (Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 22-40;
22. also in included in Syntax and Semantics, ed. P. Cole and J. Morgan (New York: Academic Press, 1975), vol. 3.
23. Kent Bach advocates such an indexical self-referential analysis of communicative intentions; see his "On Communicative Intentions: A Reply to Recanati," Mind and Language 2 (1987): 141-154.
24. For an illuminating recent account of the nature of those states, applied both to communicative intentions and to common knowledge, see Christopher Peacocke, "Joint Attention: Its Nature, Reflexivity, and Relation to Common Knowledge," in Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds, ed. N. Eilan, C. Hoerl, T. McCormack, and J. Roessler (Oxford University Press, 2005).
25. I elaborate on some of those presuppositions in my "Gricean Rational Reconstructions and the Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction," Synthese 128 (2001): 93-131;
26. and "Assertion and the Semantics of Force-Markers," in The Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction, CSLI Lecture Notes, ed. C. Bianchi (The University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 133-166.
27. John Searle's account is in the spirit of Grice's, in his "Indirect Speech Acts," in Syntax and Semantics, ed. P. Cole and J. Morgan (New York: Academic Press, 1975), vol. 3, pp. 59-82.
28. The relation between plain assertions like (7) and the fiction-making giving rise to them (Cortázar's utterance of ACP, in this case) is in my view essentially of this very sort, a kind of conversational implicature properly extended beyond Grice's proposal so as to cover indirect speech-acts ingeneral. See Grice, "Logic and Conversation." Close uses facts like this, about the way fictions manage to indirectly convey assertions and other speech-acts, to argue for a speech-act account of fiction-making. See Close, "Don Quixote and the 'Intentionalist Fallacy,'" The British Journal of Aesthetics 12 (1972): 19-39.
29. Stephen Levinson, Presumptive Meanings (MIT Press, 2000), p. 17.
30. Grice, "Logic and Conversation," p. 26.
31. This is why, as I said above in note 19, once Lewis has adopted an illocutionary-type theory, he does not need to reject (7) - in contrast to theorists like Goodman, who analyze fictionalizing in terms of the truth-properties of the conveyed propositions. Concerning the difficulties, see the criticisms by Currie (NF 12-18), Walton (MM 81-85), and Petere Lamarque and S. H. Olsen, Truth, Fiction and Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 62-69.
32. Lamarque and Olsen, Truth, Fiction and Literature, pp. 46-49.
33. I take it that my proposal is close to Jerrold Levinson's "hypothetical" intentionalism about the semantic content of fictions, although, for reasons to be elaborated in the following section, I would count the relevant communicative intentions as actual, not hypothetical. See Jerrold Levinson, "Intention and Interpretation: A Last Look," in Intention and Interpretation, ed. G. Iseminger (Temple University Press, 1992), pp. 221-256.
34. Lamarque and Olsen usefully discuss the nature of this practice in terms that I find congenial in their Truth, Fiction and Literature, pp. 29-52. They reject accounts that, like the present one, analyze fiction-making as a type of il-locutionary force because "there is little to be gained" from them (p. 72); this article tries to articulate part of what there is to be gained.
35. Put in those terms, it can be more easily compared to A. Bonomi and S. Zucchi's related proposal on pp. 117-119 of their "A Pragmatic Framework for Truth in Fiction," Dialectica 57 (2003): 103-120; their appeal to "conventions for the fiction" can be understood, along the lines here advocated, as deriving from a speech-act account of fiction-making. Phillips's proposal is also close: "A sentence of the form 'In the fiction F, ø is true if and only if, it is reasonable for an informed reader to infer from the text that, under ideal conditions, the author of F would agree that ø is a part of F" ("Truth and Inference in Fiction," p. 287). By suggesting resources for elaborating on what an author should agree to under ideal conditions, implicit in the appeal to an illocutionary-type account of fiction-making, mine improves on this.
36. I outline this interpretation in my "A Neo-Fregean Interpretation of Two-Dimensionalism," in Two-Dimensional Semantics, ed. J. Macià, and M. García-Carpintero (Oxford University Press, 2006).
37. David Kaplan, "Demonstratives," in Themes from Kaplan, ed. J. Almog, J. Perry, and H. Wettstein (Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 481-563; see p. 490.
38. David Kaplan, "Afterthoughts," in Themes from Kaplan, pp. 565-614.
39. David Kaplan, "Dthat," in Demonstratives, ed. P. Yourgrau (Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 11-32; example on pp. 30-31.
40. This essay originally appeared in Syntax and Semantics, ed. P. Cole (New York: Academic Press), pp. 221-243.
41. Kaplan, "Afterthoughts," pp. 583, 582n.
42. Marga Reimer, "Demonstratives, Demonstrations, and Demonstrata," Philosophical Studies 63 (1991): 187-202.
43. Kent Bach, "Paving the Road to Reference," Philosophical Studies 67 (1992): 295-300.
44. Howard Wettstein's discussion of several cases shows this in his "How to Bridge the Gap Between Meaning and Reference," Synthese 58 (1984): 63-84.
45. Currie provides as an example the well-known rival interpretations of Henry James's "Turn of the Screw" (NF 66).
46. For further discussion of these problems, see Currie (NF 62-70, 83-89);
47. and Phillips, "Truth and Inference in Fiction," pp. 277-281.