Being Fictional: The Nature of Fiction and Fictionality

虚构：虚构的本质和虚构性

• 批准号: 448610384
• 负责人: Dr. Richard Woodward
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Institut für Philosophie
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 资助国家: 德国
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/448610384?language=en
• 关键词: Being; Fictional; Nature; Fiction; Fictionality

Fiction offers each of us an enjoyable means of escaping the stresses of everyday life and helps us understand the world around us and our place within it. But it also raises a series of difficult philosophical challenges and the central aim of the presently project is to develop and defend a unified account of two of the central features of fiction that have typically been the focus of attention for aestheticians working in the analytic tradition. When analytic aestheticians engage with philosophical questions about fiction, they tend to have one of two contrasts in mind. The first contrast arises at the level of works, i.e. the contrast between those works that we classify as being works of fiction (such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov) and those we instead classify as being works of nonfiction (such as Barack Obama’s presentation of his life story in The Dreams of My Father and Naomi Klein’s examination of the negative effects of globalisation in No Logo). And the central question that subsequently emerges is this: what is it for a work to be one of fiction rather than one of nonfiction? The second contrast arises at the level of propositions, i.e. the contrast between those propositions that are fictional (such as the proposition that Hamlet is a prince, which is true according to Hamlet) and those that are not fictional (such as the proposition that Hamlet is a pauper, which is not true according to Hamlet). And the central question that emerges is this: what is it for a proposition to be fictional, i.e. what is it for something to be true “according to” a fiction?These two topics — hereafter, the nature of fiction and the nature of fictionality — are multi-faceted and interrelated, but have all-too-often been investigated in relative isolation from one another. In contrast, this project aims to give an account is sympathetic not only to the specific issues that arise with respect to each topic but also to the ways in which our views about the one impact upon our views about the other. And in keeping with the approach of my previous work in this area, I aim further to provide an account that integrates with cutting edge research in the wider philosophical literature on topics such as the nature of communicative acts, the psychology of imagining, and the normative role of belief. In this way, my central aim is to provide accounts of fiction and fictionality that are embedded within independently motivated accounts of connected phenomena and thereby accounts that cohere with leading views in the wider philosophical context.

小说为我们每个人提供了一种逃避日常生活压力的愉快方式，帮助我们理解周围的世界和我们在其中的位置。但它也提出了一系列困难的哲学挑战，目前项目的中心目标是发展和捍卫小说的两个核心特征的统一解释，这两个特征通常是分析美学家关注的焦点。传统.当分析美学家涉及到关于小说的哲学问题时，他们往往会想到两种对比之一。第一个对比出现在作品的层面，即那些被我们归类为虚构作品的作品（如莎士比亚的《哈姆雷特》或陀思妥耶夫斯基的《卡拉马佐夫兄弟》）与那些被我们归类为非虚构作品的作品（如巴拉克·奥巴马在《我父亲的梦想》中对自己人生故事的介绍，以及娜奥米·克莱因在《没有标志》中对全球化负面影响的审视）之间的对比。随后出现的中心问题是：一部小说作品而不是非小说作品的意义是什么？第二个对比出现在命题的层次上，即那些虚构的命题（如哈姆雷特是王子的命题，根据哈姆雷特，这是真的）和那些非虚构的命题（如哈姆雷特是贫民的命题，根据哈姆雷特，这不是真的）之间的对比。出现的中心问题是：什么是一个命题是虚构的，也就是说，什么是“根据”一个虚构的东西是真实的？这两个主题--下文称为虚构的本质和虚构性的本质--是多方面的，相互关联的，但往往是在相对孤立的情况下进行研究的。相比之下，这个项目的目的是给出一个帐户是同情不仅出现在每个主题的具体问题，但也对我们的观点对一个影响我们对其他的看法的方式。为了与我以前在这一领域的工作方法保持一致，我的目标是进一步提供一个帐户，与更广泛的哲学文献中的前沿研究相结合，如交往行为的本质，想象的心理学，以及信仰的规范作用。通过这种方式，我的中心目标是提供对虚构和虚构性的解释，这些解释嵌入在对相关现象的独立动机的解释中，从而与更广泛的哲学背景中的主要观点相一致。