I argue that judgments of what is ‘true in a fiction’ presuppose the Reality Assumption: the assumption that everything that is true is fictionally the case, unless excluded by the work. By contrast with the more familiar Reality Principle, the Reality Assumption is not a rule for inferring implied content from what is explicit. Instead, it provides an array of real-world truths that can be used in such inferences. I claim that the Reality Assumption is essential to our ability to (...) understand stories, drawing on a range of empirical evidence that demonstrates our reliance on it in narrative comprehension. However, the Reality Assumption has several unintuitive consequences, not least that what is fictionally the case includes countless facts that neither authors nor readers could ever consider. I argue that such consequences provide no reason to reject the Reality Assumption. I conclude that we should take fictions, like non-fictions, to be about the real world. (shrink)

Standard theories define fiction in terms of an invited response of imagining or make-believe. I argue that these theories are not only subject to numerous counterexamples, they also fail to explain why classification matters to our understanding and evaluation of works of fiction as well as non-fiction. I propose instead that we construe fiction and non-fiction as genres: categories whose membership is determined by a cluster of nonessential criteria, and which play a role in the appreciation of particular works. I (...) claim that this proposal captures the intuitions motivating alternative theories of fiction. (shrink)

How do we understand the agency and significance of material forces and their interface with human bodies? What does it mean to be human in these times, with bodies that are inextricably interconnected with our physical world? Bodily Natures considers these questions by grappling with powerful and pervasive material forces and their increasingly harmful effects on the human body. Drawing on feminist theory, environmental studies, and the sciences, Stacy Alaimo focuses on trans-corporeality, or movement across bodies and nature, which (...) has profoundly altered our sense of self. By looking at a broad range of creative and philosophical writings, Alaimo illuminates how science, politics, and culture collide, while considering the closeness of the human body to the environment. (shrink)

Engagement with fiction often inspires emotional responses. We may pity Sethe while feeling ambivalent about her actions (in Beloved), fear for Ellen Ripley as she battles monstrous creatures (in Alien), get angry at Okonkwo for killing Ikemefuna (in Things Fall Apart), and hope that Kiyoaki and Satoko find love (in Spring Snow). Familiar as they are, these reactions are puzzling. Why do I respond emotionally if I do not believe that these individuals exist or that the events occurred? If I (...) merely imagine that my best friend has betrayed me, I do not become angry with him; if I did, I would be considered irrational. Yet although beliefs seem to be necessary for emotions in other contexts, we respond to fiction without the relevant beliefs. These observations prompt two questions about our emotional responses to fiction (henceforth: fictional emotions). The first is descriptive: Should fictional emotions be classified as the same kind of emotions we experience in other contexts? The second is normative: Are fictional emotions irrational or otherwise inappropriate? I take each of these debates in turn. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:277 HUME'S IMPRESSIONS OF BELIEF Introduction Hume's theory of belief is often taken to be fully stated in his opening remarks on the subject in A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part III, Section VII: "An opinion, therefore, or belief may be most accurately defin'd, A LIVELY IDEA RELATED TO OR ASSOCIATED WITH A PRESENT IMPRESSION."1 Taking this definition as Hume's final account leaves the reader with many (...) problems. What is it for an idea to be lively? How is an idea related to or associated with an impression? Is belief really so simple a phenomenon? I argue that Hume's theory of belief is much more complex than this, and that the Treatise contains only a rough, preliminary account of belief. By the time he wrote An Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding, Hume had developed his theory in full detail. As I show, in this latter account a belief is an intentional state involving a combination of Humean ideas and impressions. The nature of these ideas and impressions allows the mind to take note of a belief as something quite different from its other perceptions. In the Treatise, however, Hume did not have a clear understanding of how the mind could distinguish beliefs from other perceptions. He could only go so far as to say that an idea believed is livelier than other ideas. He argued that a present impression is capable of calling to mind an idea of something that has been associated with that impression in the past, and of transferring some of its own vivacity to that idea. As we look at the account of belief in the Treatise, we will see how the preliminary concepts of force and liveliness and a transference of vivacity lay the foundation for his 278 final account, yet point to a need for a fuller explication of the difference the mind notes between beliefs and other perceptions. We will see that in the Appendix to the Treatise Hume tried to work out this difference in terms of 'feeling' but this was unsuccessful without the notion of an intentional act. Finally, we will see that Hume concluded in the Enquiry that a belief is an intentional state in which a new impression of reflection arises about the idea believed. This new impression is the feeling of belief by which beliefs are distinguished from other 2 perceptions of the mind. The Account in the Treatise We begin our explication of Hume's theory of belief by looking at the account in A Treatise of Human Nature. Here Hume maintains that it is ideas which are believed, and that these beliefs differ from other ideas only in their "force and vivacity" (T 96). This force and vivacity is a result of the believed idea's relation to an impression. These theses lead us to the familiar Treatise definition of belief as "A LIVELY IDEA RELATED TO OR ASSOCIATED WITH A PRESENT IMPRESSION" (T 96). Hume begins his analysis of belief in Section VII of the Treatise by stating that "the idea of an object is an essential part of the belief of it, but not the whole" (T 94). The suggestion is that there is more to being in a state of belief than merely entertaining the idea believed. The simple phrase "belief o_f_ an object" leads us to presume that it is ideas that are believed, or that we have beliefs o_f ideas. We will need to examine Hume's meaning of 'idea' in enough depth to understand the role it plays in the theory of belief. 279 Hume gives some examples of the way we may conceive ideas without believing them: Suppose a person present with me, who advances propositions, to which I do not assent, that Caesar dy'd in his bed, that silver is more fusible than lead, or mercury heavier than gold; 'tis evident, that notwithstanding my incredulity, I clearly understand his meaning, and form all the same ideas, which he forms (T 95). Note that Hume says one may form all the same ideas as another. Yet the ideas one forms are just what Hume had earlier called the propositions one... (shrink)

By insisting on the importance of materiality, this volume breaks new ground in philosophy, feminist theory, cultural studies, science studies, and other fields where the body and nature collide.

If there are no fictional characters, how do we explain thought and discourse apparently about them? If there are, what are they like? A growing number of philosophers claim that fictional characters are abstract objects akin to novels or plots. They argue that postulating characters provides the most straightforward explanation of our literary practices as well as a uniform account of discourse and thought about fiction. Anti-realists counter that postulation is neither necessary nor straightforward, and that the invocation of pretense (...) provides a better account of the same phenomena. I outline and assess these competing theories. (shrink)

Statements about fictional characters, such as “Gregor Samsa has been changed into a beetle,” pose the problem of how we can say something true (or false) using empty names. I propose an original solution to this problem that construes such utterances as reports of the “prescriptions to imagine” generated by works of fiction. In particular, I argue that we should construe these utterances as specifying, not what we are supposed to imagine—the propositional object of the imagining—but how we are supposed (...) to imagine. Most other theories of thought and discourse about fictional characters either fail to capture the intentionality of our imaginings, or else obscure the differences between imaginings directed toward fictional characters and those directed toward real individuals. I argue that once we have an account of prescriptions to imagine about real individuals, we can adapt the same framework to specify the contents of prescriptions to imagine about fictional characters, and thereby to account for the truth (or falsity) of statements about fictional characters. (shrink)

This paper examines the intersection of technical law and common sense reasoning in small claims arbitration, a distinctive and increasingly prevalent kind of legal work. Following (Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology’s program: Working out Durkheim’s aphorism, 2002), the study explores the “reform of technical reason” and what a “just outcome” means by focusing on the arbitration of actual small claims cases and how technical-legal and non-technical/informal resources are brought into alignment to produce dispute resolution. The arbitrator elicits discussions that establish consensual and commonplace (...) formulations of “the case,” formulations that foreshadow its disposition as technical matters of law. The research demonstrates how formal structures of equity, evenhandedness, and decisions without bias have their production in vivo, and how a just and fair course becomes a “just outcome.”. (shrink)

In Undomesticated Ground, Stacy Alaimo issues a bold call to reclaim nature as feminist space.

Book synopsis: New work on a hot topic by an outstanding team of authors At the intersection of several central areas of philosophy It is the linguistic job of singular terms to pick out the objects that we think or talk about. But what about singular terms that seem to fail to designate anything, because the objects they refer to don't exist? We can employ these terms in meaningful thought and talk, which suggests that they are succeeding in fulfilling their (...) representational task. A team of leading experts presents new essays on the much-debated problem of empty reference and thought. In the 1960s and 1970s Keith Donnellan, David Kaplan, Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam initiated a revolution in the then standard conception of reference—a concept at the core of philosophical inquiry. The repercussions of the revolution, particularly felt in metaphysics and epistemology, were soon refined by other influential writers such as Tyler Burge, Gareth Evans, and John Perry. They argued that some linguistic and mental representations have contents individuated by what they are about—by ordinary referents of expressions such as proper names, indexicals, definite descriptions and common nouns, i.e. by planets, people or natural kinds. The view was at odds with a central philosophical presumption at that time: that cognitive and linguistic access to objective reality is indirect and accidental, mediated by general descriptive characterizations, the only constitutive semantic feature of the expressions; hence its ontological and epistemological repercussions. A turning-point in the debate about how linguistic and mental representation reach external contents concerned the nature of empty mental and linguistic representations, framed by means of the very same expressions crucially invoked in the Donnellan-Kaplan-Kripke-Putnam arguments. The papers in this volume address different aspects of reference and thought about the non-existent. (shrink)

It is widely taken for granted that fictions, including both literature and film,influence our attitudes toward real people, events, and situations. Philosopherswho defend claims about the cognitive value of fiction view this influence in apositive light, while others worry about the potential moral danger of fiction.Marketers hope that visual and aural references to their products in movies willhave an effect on people’s buying patterns. Psychologists study the persuasiveimpact of media. Educational books and films are created in the hopes of guidingchildren’s (...) and adult’s preferences toward socially acceptable norms.The influencesdiscussed by marketers, psychologists, educators, and philosophers tend to be bothcognitive and affective. It seems that we can be “emotionally persuaded”: ourpreferences can be changed, our feelings about particular people or events can beinfluenced, and so forth. (shrink)

A familiar question in the literature on emotional responses to fiction, originally put forward by Colin Radford, is how such responses can be rational. How can we make sense of pitying Anna Karenina when we know there is no such person? In this paper I argue that contrary to the usual interpretation, the question of rationality has nothing to do with the Paradox of Fiction. Instead, the real problem is why there is a divergence in our normative assessments of emotions (...) in different contexts. I argue that explaining this divergence requires a more nuanced account of the rationality of emotion than has previously been proposed. One advantage of my proposal over alternatives is that it helps to explain one way we can learn emotionally from fiction and imagination. (shrink)

Two assumptions are common in discussions of the paradox of tragedy: (1) that tragic pleasure requires that the work be fictional or, if non-fiction, then non-transparently represented; and (2) that tragic pleasure may be provoked by a wide variety of art forms. In opposition to (1) I argue that certain documentaries could produce tragic pleasure. This is not to say that any sad or painful documentary could do so. In considering which documentaries might be plausible candidates, I further argue, against (...) (2), that the scope of tragic pleasure is limited to works that possess certain thematic and narrative features. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy harbors a recurrent tension between full inclusion and intelligible speech. People with profound cognitive disabilities often signify this tension. While liberal deliberative theorists sacrifice inclusion for intelligibility, this exclusion is unnecessary. Instead, by analyzing deliberative locations that already include people with disabilities, I offer two ways to revise deliberative norms. First, the physical presence of disabled bodies expands the value of publicity in deliberative democracy, demonstrating that the publicity of bodies provokes new conversations similar to rational speech acts. (...) Second, the inclusion of people with profound disabilities necessitates a form of collaborative speech in which individuals make claims collaboratively. Habermas offers an ideal site to pursue this analysis because he recognizes the theoretical tension between inclusion and intelligibility and because his personal testimony reveals important insight into the lived experience of disability. (shrink)

The currently standard approach to fiction is to define it in terms of imagination. I have argued elsewhere that no conception of imagining is sufficient to distinguish a response appropriate to fiction as opposed to non-fiction. In her contribution Kathleen Stock seeks to refute this objection by providing a more sophisticated account of the kind of propositional imagining prescribed by so-called ‘fictive utterances’. I argue that although Stock's proposal improves on other theories, it too fails to provide an adequate criterion (...) of fictionality. I conclude by sketching an alternative account according to which fiction is a genre. (shrink)

We apply an action-oriented approach to business ethics education, Giving Voice to Values (GVV), to the topic of sustainability. The increasingly problematic impact of unsustainable economic activity is demanding actionable responses from business. However, traditional business ethics education has focussed on awareness and decision-making and neglected action-oriented methods. The GVV curriculum offers an applied and process-driven ethics approach thatcomplements more analytical ethics pedagogies. Because of its focus on action and expressing personal values, GVV can be thought of as largely applicable (...) to the micro-level of interpersonal interactions. This paper illustrates GVV’s potential for much broader application by presenting two caselettes spanning the micro-level of workplace refurbishment to the global-level of the mass dumping of electronic waste. Ways of crafting conversations around these sustainability issues are presented and implications of the GVV approach for both the teaching and practice of sustainability ethics are discussed. (shrink)

Most discussions of proper names in fiction concern the names of fictional characters, such as ‘Clarissa Dalloway’ or ‘Lilliput.’ Less attention has been paid to referring names in fiction, such as ‘Napoleon’ (in Tolstoy’s War and Peace) or ‘London’ (in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four). This is because many philosophers simply assume that such names are unproblematic; they refer in the usual way to their ordinary referents. The alternative position, dubbed Exceptionalism by Manuel García-Carpintero, maintains that referring names make a distinctive semantic (...) contribution in fiction. In this paper I offer a positive argument for Non-Exceptionalism, relying on the claim that works of both fiction and non-fiction can express the same singular propositions. I go on to defend my account against García-Carpintero’s objections. (shrink)

In this paper, I review developments in discussions of fiction and emotion over the last decade concerning both the descriptive question of how to classify fiction-directed emotions and the normative question of how to evaluate those emotions. Although many advances have been made on these topics, a mistaken assumption is still common: that we must hold either that fiction-directed emotions are (empirically or normatively) the same as other emotions, or that they are different. I argue that we should reject this (...) dichotomy. (shrink)

In their forthcoming article, ‘What makes a medical intervention invasive?’ De Marco, Simons, and colleagues explore the meaning and usage of the term ‘invasive’ in medical contexts. They describe a ‘Standard Account’, drawn from dictionary definitions, which defines invasiveness as ‘incision of the skin or insertion of an object into the body’. They then highlight cases wherein invasiveness is employed in a manner that is inconsistent with this account (eg, in describing psychotherapy) to argue that the term invasiveness is often (...) used to explicitly or implicitly reference interventions that do not fall under the standard account. The authors offer an alternative ‘schematic’ definition of invasiveness, whereby medical interventions entail an underlying context-independent property of ‘basic invasiveness’ and may be understood both relative to each other and to a context-specific threshold of what is ‘invasive’.1 We propose that the meaning of terms such as ‘invasiveness’ is necessarily heterogeneous, and that what is implied by its usage will certainly depend on context, particularly in medical settings. Hence, the creation of a unifying definition is less critical than clarification of the implied and intended meanings of each instance of the term’s use. We further argue that interpreting the use of terms like ‘invasiveness’ in medical practice is complicated by the embedding of each use of this term in a different ‘language game’, whereby words and their meanings are understood by an in-group familiar with …. (shrink)

Overdiagnosis is an emerging problem in health policy and practice: we address its definition and ethical implications. We argue that the definition of overdiagnosis should be expressed at the level of populations. Consider a condition prevalent in a population, customarily labelled with diagnosis A. We propose that overdiagnosis is occurring in respect of that condition in that population when the condition is being identified and labelled with diagnosis A in that population ; this identification and labelling would be accepted as (...) correct in a relevant professional community; but the resulting label and/or intervention carries an unfavourable balance between benefits and harms. We identify challenges in determining and weighting relevant harms, then propose three central ethical considerations in overdiagnosis: the extent of harm done, whether harm is avoidable and whether the primary goal of the actor/s concerned is to benefit themselves or the patient, citizen or society. This distinguishes predatory, misdirected and tragic overdiagnosis; the degree of harm moderates the justifiability of each type. We end with four normative challenges: methods for adjudicating between professional standards and identifying relevant harms and benefits should be procedurally just; individuals, organisations and states are differently responsible for addressing overdiagnosis; overdiagnosis is a matter for distributive justice: the burdens of both overdiagnosis and its prevention could fall on the least-well-off; and communicating about overdiagnosis risks harming those unaware that they may have been overdiagnosed. These challenges will need to be addressed as the field develops. (shrink)

The empirical turn in bioethics and the deliberative turn in democracy theory occurred at around the same time, one at the intersection of bioethics and social science,1 2 the other at the intersection of political philosophy and political science.3–5 Empirical bioethics and deliberative democratic approaches both engage with immediate problems in policy and practice with normative intent, so it was perhaps inevitable that they would eventually find one another,6–8 and that deliberative research would become more common in bioethics.9 This commentary (...) responds to a paper by Ford et al, who ran a single jury of 18 people in Brighton in the UK in June 2018.10 The jury were asked to consider whether secondary research use of non-structured, free-text data from medical records should be permitted. I will consider three issues: the effort required in deliberative work, the challenge of sampling and selection of jurors and the basis for drawing normative conclusions from deliberative research. First: this report makes clear the effort involved in running a jury. These researchers contracted an external agency experienced in the method, established an oversight committee of policy-makers with power to act, developed expert witness briefs, selected witnesses and coordinated their testimony, and created a questionnaire to measure participants’ views, activities to support their understanding, and a scenario for consideration. …. (shrink)

I argue that greater attention to human agency and normativity in both researching and practicing service improvement may be one strategy for enhancing improvement science, illustrating with examples from cancer screening. Improvement science tends to deliberately avoid explicit normativity, for paradigmatically coherent reasons. But there are good reasons to consider including explicit normativity in thinking about improvement. Values and moral judgements are central to social life, so an adequate account of social life must include these elements. And improvement itself is (...) unavoidably normative: it assumes that things could and should be better than they are. I seek to show that normativity will always be implicated in the creation of evidence, the design of programs, the practice of healthcare, and in citizens’ judgements about that care, and to make a case that engaging with this normativity is worthwhile. (shrink)

I claim that we should reject a sharp distinction between fiction and non-fiction according to which documentary is a faithful representation of the facts, whilst fiction films merely invite us to imagine what is made up. Instead, we should think of fiction and non-fiction as genres: categories whose membership is determined by a combination of non-essential features and which influence appreciation in a variety of ways. An objection to this approach is that it renders the distinction too conventional and fragile, (...) undermining our justification for criticising documentaries like Bowling for Columbine or The Hunting Ground for playing fast and loose with the facts. I argue that this objection is misguided, misidentifying the justification for criticising non-fiction films that mislead or deceive. I develop an alternative account that explains why we also criticise many fictions for inaccuracy. (shrink)

Journal of Global Ethics, Volume 9, Issue 3, Page 293-310, December 2013.

Many philosophers have drawn parallels between scientific models and fictions. In this paper I will be concerned with a recent version of the analogy, which compares models to the imagined characters of fictional literature. Though versions of the position differ, the shared idea is that modeling essentially involves imagining concrete systems analogously to the way that we imagine characters and events in response to works of fiction. Advocates of this view argue that imagining concrete systems plays an ineliminable role in (...) the practice of modeling that cannot be captured by other accounts. The approach thus leaves open what we should say about the ontological status of model-systems, and here advocates differ among themselves, defending a variety of realist or anti-realist positions. I argue that this debate over the ontological status of model-systems is misguided. If model-systems are the kinds of objects fictional realists posit, they can play no role in explaining the epistemology of modeling for an advocate of this approach. So they are at best superfluous. Defenders of the approach should focus on developing an account of the epistemological role of imagining model-systems. (shrink)

What does feminist disability studies contribute to feminist methods? Feminist disability scholars interweave life-writing about their experiences of disability or caring for a disabled person to challenge ableist stereotypes. As such, they foreground their own vulnerability to build disability identity and community. This style of life-writing, while essential, tends to calcify the dichotomy between the disabled and abled—a binary that the field of feminist disability studies aims to destabilise. Building on new work in feminist disability studies, I show how some (...) scholars use life-writing to cultivate an estranging sensitivity. This new sensitivity builds on prior feminist disability studies scholarship to estrange us from 1) the idea that disability is a cohesive identity and community, 2) that disability is always a socially desirable position, and 3) that allegiance to disability rights insulates us from ableist anxiety. By embracing the tension between solidifying and destabilising the meaning of disability, feminist disability scholars can leverage life-writing as a tool of resistance and thereby lessen the threat of conformity that life narratives tend to produce. (shrink)

The aim of a theoretically ideal process of informed consent is to promote the autonomy of the patient and to limit unethical physician paternalism. However, in practice, the nature of the medical profession requires physicians to act as ontological decision architects—based on the medical knowledge that they acquire through their experience and training, physicians ontologically determine a subset of viable courses of action for their patient. What is observed is not an unethical physician limitation or biasing of the patient towards (...) certain treatment options that violates patient autonomy or consciously undermines informed consent, but rather a more foundational paternalism that is necessarily inherent to the physician–patient relationship. In this article we argue for a recognition of this underlying physician paternalism and posit that this necessary paternalism is not a foil to patient autonomy, but rather a foundational aspect of the duties of the medical professional within the physician–patient relationship. (shrink)

The most well-known and controversial solution to the paradox of fiction is Kendall Walton’s, according to whom pity of (say) Anna Karenina is not genuine pity. Walton’s opponents argue that we can resolve the paradox of fiction while preserving the intuition that our response to Anna is ordinary, run-of-the-mill pity; and they claim that retaining this intuition explains more than Walton’s approach. In my view, the arguments of Walton’s opponents depend on idiosyncratic features of examples involving purely fictional characters like (...) Anna Karenina. What is really at issue is the fact that we respond emotionally to fiction in ways that are not explained by our beliefs, but instead by what we imagine. That this is the crux of the paradox of fiction becomes clear only when we consider fictions about real persons and events. And I contend that once we turn our attention to these cases, Walton’s theory proves significantly more explanatory than the opposition. (shrink)

Human rights instruments exist to respond to serious dangers that human beings routinely face, what Henry Shue terms ‘standard threats.’ According to Shue’s influential account of the structure of a moral right, these threats are ‘the targets of the social guarantees for the enjoyment of … a right.’ They are ‘common, or ordinary, and serious but remediable.’ Yet for individuals who struggle daily against serious, remediable threats that are common to their peer group, but do not routinely threaten mainstream society, (...) this oversight has enormous implications for their security, subsistence, freedom, and dignity. This paper examines the three elements of Shue’s standard threat. It concludes by making the case that if we are to deploy this element of the structure of moral rights to justify social guarantees of protection, and to craft them in a way that takes proper account of human diversity, then we must ask: Standard for whom? (shrink)