Can fiction tell us genuine truths about the world and ourselves, or does it mainly invite us into a kind of structured pretense that can mislead as easily as it can illuminate?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Manuel García-Carpintero is Professor of philosophy at the University of Barcelona. His work has focused on a variety of issues in and related to the philosophy of language, such as fiction, assertion, proper names, presuppositions, quotation, and more.
2. Interview Summary
Manuel García-Carpintero frames the interview around the classic Plato/Aristotle dispute about whether we can learn from fiction. He notes that ordinary audiences often treat fictions (especially “based on a true story” works) as conveying truths, and he uses examples like the biopic Rocketman and debates around the Chernobyl—including Masha Gessen’s piece in The New Yorker about the HBO series—to illustrate how viewers criticize “lies” even when something is openly fictionalized. He then draws a careful distinction between ‘truth in fiction’ (correctly stating what the story says) and the more contentious idea that fiction can communicate truths about the world or “the human condition” that go beyond the story’s explicit content. This is where the Plato/Aristotle contrast becomes vivid: Plato’s worry is that fiction can mislead, while Aristotle’s more optimistic line is that poetry can deliver more general, “philosophical” insight than history.
The conversation then turns to ‘pretense theory’, the idea that fiction-making involves speakers acting as if they are asserting things while not genuinely asserting them—illustrated with cases like J. K. Rowling writing about wizards. García-Carpintero agrees this picture captures something important and explains why it became a mainstream approach (with roots traced to figures like Margaret MacDonald and J. L. Austin). He also connects pretense to ‘immersion’: the psychological sense of being “present” in a fictional world can be modeled as going along with a kind of narrated pretense (he uses Dr. Watson-style narration in Sherlock Holmes stories to make the pull of this model intuitive). But he argues pretense can’t be the whole story: lots of everyday pretending isn’t fiction, and some fictions (including self-undermining or “postmodern” cases) make it clear that no one is straightforwardly “telling you” facts—so we need a more positive account of fiction-making as a representational activity, with pretense functioning as a common tool rather than the essence.
On the semantic side, he’s sympathetic to David Lewis’s possible-worlds framework as a modeling technique for the special discourse we use when we describe what a fiction says—without taking possible worlds to be “real”. Part of the attraction, he suggests, is that it pushes toward an abstract notion of content that can in principle be shared across languages and even across media (novel/film/theater), which helps make sense of adaptation and “faithfulness”. At the same time, he worries about Lewis-style implementations that effectively force a ubiquitous narrator/asserter into every fiction, and he discusses how principles for implicit content have to handle tricky phenomena like unreliable narrators—sometimes motivating probabilistic/conditional-probability ideas about what’s “taken for granted” in the story. Finally, on fictional entities and names, he pushes back on views that treat names like Emma Woodhouse as referring to abstract artifacts; instead, he treats the “artifact talk” (e.g., saying a character was created by Jane Austen) as derivative and emphasizes a presuppositional picture where names come with reference-fixing descriptive material—helping with “mixed” comparisons like Mickey Mouse vs. Nancy Pelosi, or liking Harry Potter more than Donald Trump, and with co-identification inside a fiction (Superman = Clark Kent).
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:17 - Importance of fiction
08:52 - Truth in fiction
13:37 - Pretense theory
26:52 - David Lewis’s view
38:37 - Issues with pretense theory
44:15 - Fictional entities
1:04:12 - Issue with Meinongianism
1:07:10 - Graham Priest’s view
1:18:12 - Another issue with Meinongianism
1:20:46 - Likelihood in fiction
1:39:04 - Reality principle
1:41:13 - Coreferring names
1:49:42 - Propositions
1:58:22 - Fiction as falsehoods
2:01:40 - Value of philosophy
2:12:11 - Conclusion
