What does it mean for something to be “true in a fiction,” and why might even the category of “art” be a historically contingent way of organizing aesthetic practices?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Kendall Walton is Emeritus Charles Stevenson Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. His work has focused on the philosophy of art, as well as other issues in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and language.
2. Interview Summary
Kendall Walton lays out his core idea about “truth in fiction”: roughly, a proposition is fictional in a given context when it is to be imagined (in a normative, “prescribed” sense) as part of properly engaging with that work or practice. He emphasizes that “fictional worlds” aren’t limited to novels and films: they can arise in fleeting, ordinary social moments wherever there are local prescriptions about what to imagine—like people lying in a meadow informally “adopting” a rule about whether a cloud counts as a bear or an elephant. Walton also downplays the importance of drawing a sharp boundary between works of fiction and nonfiction (since many cultures or contexts may not treat that as central), while insisting that it often does matter which propositions are true-in-the-fiction. When the interviewer asks about “pretense” theories, Walton is broadly sympathetic but prefers “imagination” because it covers passive cases (e.g., simply looking at a picture) as well as more active, game-like pretending; he also admits we still lack a fully general account of what imagining is.
A big part of the discussion is about pressure points for simple tests like “to be imagined = fictional.” Walton highlights how background knowledge helps generate many implicit fictional truths via something like a “reality principle” (e.g., if a story presents someone as a normal human, then—should the question arise—lots of ordinary facts about humans come along for free), while still allowing that these truths differ radically in importance to the work. At the same time, he stresses that a work can mandate imaginings that are not true in the relevant fictional world: for instance, to interpret an embedded picture inside a painting (his Vermeer/Cupid example), viewers may have to imagine Cupid even though (strictly speaking) the larger painting only makes it fictional that there is a picture of Cupid. Similarly, one might have to imagine something odd (like a “golf ball nose”) to see what’s being depicted or pointed out, even though that proposition isn’t true “in the picture as a whole.” Walton’s solution is to distinguish different clusters or nested fictional worlds—separating what’s true in the primary fiction from what’s required to grasp an internal representation or a local interpretive task.
The interview then turns to aesthetics and the concept of art. Walton argues that aesthetics lacks a single “grand basic question” in the way ethics is often organized around “How should we live?”, and he describes recent aesthetics as an intellectually rich but somewhat ununified “hodgepodge” of topics. He adds a historical diagnosis: the Western category of “fine art” as a single unified genus is relatively late (he cites Oscar Kristeller’s claim that it emerges around 1750), which helps explain why theorists’ competing “definitions of art” can feel disconnected or like people are talking past each other. Even if the question “What is art?” mattered enormously in some settings (like the 1960s/70s New York avant-garde), Walton thinks it can be beside the point for understanding many other practices (e.g., Greek sculpture or Javanese gamelan), where you can study what the works do and how they matter without forcing them under a modern category. Methodologically, this ties into his sympathy for a kind of conceptual engineering: once we have the “data” of our practices and reactions, philosophy can aim to organize it more perspicuously—sometimes by revising or inventing concepts—rather than assuming the folk extension of “art” sets the target and then hunting for strict necessary-and-sufficient conditions.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:49 - Fiction
08:28 - Fiction and vagueness
10:50 - Pretense theory
12:48 - Imagining
18:59 - Fictions in fiction
22:01 - Resolving problems
23:59 - Broadest world
29:26 - Bizarre fictions
31:50 - Norms of fiction
38:09 - Another issue
40:18 - Reality principle
43:15 - Varying norms
45:52 - Aesthetics
51:18 - What is art?
55:42 - Is the dispute substantive?
59:50 - Empirical psychology
1:03:56 - Representation
1:05:56 - Folk concepts
1:12:32 - Conceptual engineering
1:16:29 - Relevance to art
1:19:11 - Dispensing with “art”?
1:23:24 - Value theory
1:26:17 - Empathy
1:32:06 - Empathy by negation
1:36:07 - Value of philosophy
1:38:36 - Conclusion
