Being Fictional: The Nature of Fiction and Fictionality

小说为我们每个人提供了一种逃离日常生活压力的愉快方式，并帮助我们了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，当前项目的中心目标是开发和捍卫小说的两个核心特征的统一描述，这两个特征通常是从事分析传统工作的美学家关注的焦点。当分析美学家提出关于小说的哲学问题时，他们的脑海中往往会有两个反差。第一个对比出现在作品层面，即我们归类为虚构作品(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》)和那些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》中对他的生平故事的呈现，以及娜奥米·克莱因在《No Logo》中对全球化负面影响的审视)之间的对比。随后出现的核心问题是：一部作品是虚构的，而不是非虚构的？第二个对比出现在命题层面，即虚构的命题(如哈姆雷特认为哈姆雷特是王子的命题)和非虚构的命题(如哈姆雷特认为哈姆雷特是穷人的命题)之间的对比。出现的核心问题是：一个命题是虚构的是什么，即根据小说，什么是真的？这两个话题--此后，虚构的性质和虚构的性质--是多方面的和相互关联的，但往往是相对孤立地进行研究。相反，这个项目的目的是说明我们不仅对每个主题出现的具体问题表示同情，而且还对我们对一个主题的看法对我们对另一个主题的看法产生影响的方式表示同情。按照我以前在这一领域工作的方法，我的目标是进一步提供一个与更广泛的哲学文献中关于交往行为的性质、想象的心理学和信仰的规范作用等主题的前沿研究相结合的描述。通过这种方式，我的中心目标是提供对虚构和虚构的描述，这些描述嵌入到对相关现象的独立动机描述中，从而与更广泛的哲学背景下的主要观点相一致。

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.