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Imagining fictional contradictions

  • Imagination and its Limits
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Abstract

It is widely believed, among philosophers of literature, that imagining contradictions is as easy as telling or reading a story with contradictory content. Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight (1962), for instance, concerns a knight who performs many brave deeds, but who does not exist. Anything at all, they argue, can be true in a story, including contradictions and other impossibilia. While most will readily concede that we cannot objectually imagine contradictions, they nevertheless insist that we can propositionally imagine them, and regularly do, simply by entertaining a text which prompts us to do so. I argue that this narrative does not bear scrutiny for two main reasons. First, because propositional imagining is beside the point, where truth in fiction is concerned; evaluating truth in fiction engages the cognitive architecture in ways that prohibit the mobilization of merely propositional imagination to that end. And second, because it is not obvious, given the strategies usually suggested, that we ever propositionally imagine contradictions in the first place—in fact, it seems we go out of our way to avoid directly imagining them.

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Notes

  1. Lest I be accused of having an over-active imagination, the rompo is a creature from African and Indian legend (but possibly a reference to the porcupine).

  2. The slogan is standardly taken to mean that the ‘impossible’ is not real—in other words, that nothing is impossible.

  3. Interested parties should consult Peacocke (1985), Goldman (1989), Currie and Ravenscroft (2002: Ch. 2, pp. 111–133), Kung (2010), Kind (2013), Balcerak Jackson (2016), Stock (2017: Ch. 6, pp. 175–207), and Arcangeli (2019a, b).

  4. Although some imaginings may be involuntary, as when we actively try not to imagine pink elephants.

  5. Indeed, there is good evidence from social psychology indicating that the real world constrains our ability to creatively imagine new things; see e.g. Ward (1994) and Brédart et al. (1998).

  6. Several strategies for doing so have been suggested. I shall consider these in §5.

  7. Stacie Friend characterizes this as the ‘Reality Assumption’, which she argues underpins all our principles of generation (2017). Philosophers of literature are more or less unanimously agreed on this point, although they have articulated slightly different versions of the principle; see e.g. John Woods’s ‘fill conditions’ (1974: pp. 63–65), later reconfigured as his ‘world-inheritance thesis’ (2018), and Marie-Laure Ryan’s ‘principle of minimal departure’ (1980). Gendler (2000: pp. 75–76) and Brian Weatherson (2004: p. 17) likewise commit to something like the Reality Assumption.

  8. Ultimately, however, Weinberg and Meskin do accept that we can imagine some irremediable contradictions, such as that twelve is and is not the sum of five and seven (2006: p. 191).

  9. This is especially true of Lewis’s Analysis 1, although even his Analysis 2 retains the structure of ‘being told as known fact’.

  10. These have sometimes been referred to as ‘mental imagery’, but Arcangeli (2019a, b) persuasively argues that the equation of mental imagery with sensory imagination results from a confusion between two senses of ‘mental imagery’. To avoid such confusion, I have adopted her locution of ‘sensory imagination’ for the attitudinal sense of ‘mental imagery’.

  11. ‘Attitudinal’, in Arcangeli’s terms (2019a, b).

  12. Note, however, that Kind disagrees in her (2001); in fact, Kind argues that we should not be so quick to distinguish sensory imagination from the kinds of tasks we perform with the help of propositions.

  13. I consider some strategies for objectually imagining contradictions in §5.

  14. i.e. reading focused on propositional content (not to be conflated with propositional imagining).

  15. More recently, in a study of how people construct fictional worlds, Weisberg and Goodstein suggest that we may well encode different facts into fictional worlds on occurrent versus reflective readings (2009: pp. 75–76).

  16. My thanks to Hannah Kim, who pointed me to worries about fictive A- and B-series in conversation.

  17. As Weatherson (2004: p. 17) might put it, the level of detail required of our acts of imagination varies with the goals of the endeavour in question.

  18. To be fair, I only notice the violations because I am a stickler for detail. I doubt most readers ever notice these violations, even upon reflection.

  19. I am indebted to Brandon Polite for this example.

  20. I suppose such a story could instead prompt us to question our beliefs about the real world. That stories do not typically do so, I think, is due to the fact that our understanding of stories is necessarily shaped by the demands of the Reality Assumption, which sees us encode the world as it is. If paraconsistent logicians (for example) are right that the logic of the world is paraconsistent, then it turns out that the demands of the Reality Assumption—and thus the limits of storytelling—are not as we thought them to be.

  21. This claim is borne out by evidence from the psychology of text processing, notably Prentice et al. (1997) and Wheeler et al. (1997), and is predicted by the architectural model of the imagination (see Meskin and Weinberg 2011: pp. 242–246 and p. 246 fn. 6).

  22. There is no reason to suppose that occurrent/reflective modes of engagement are limited to our consumption of stories and narrative art. In fact, I think it quite likely that we slip in and out of them when engaging with music, for example, or visual art. Someone who notices that their eye has been fooled, for example, might shift from occurrently appreciating a painting to reflectively appreciating it qua trompe l’oeil, just as noticing Nirvana’s use of assonance might trigger more musicological reflection on their songs.

  23. See e.g. Meskin and Weinberg (2011: p. 242).

  24. In Weatherson’s terms: I have imagined a higher-level claim at a (sufficiently low) level of detail that does not also require me to imagine the lower-level claims it would need to be true—which I am prevented from doing in any case by the background assumptions governing my and our engagement with fiction (2004: pp. 20–21).

  25. Priest (2005: pp. 57–61) suggests that some visual illusions, such as the waterfall effect or Penrose’s Figure, are cases where we really do see the inconsistent. Meskin and Weinberg offer a convincing architectural explanation of what is going on in such cases in their (2011: p. 245). To my mind, these are paradigmatic cases of what Roy Sorensen calls ‘meta-conceiving’ (2006), on which more below.

  26. To be clear, this is almost certainly another inadvertent error on Rowling’s part. But the strategy deployed by Potterheads neatly illustrates the kind of tack we take when faced with properly deliberate inconsistencies.

  27. Priest makes the essentially same suggestion (in terms of ‘conceiving’) in his (2016: pp. 2658–2660).

  28. Just what the relation is between supposition and imagination is a fraught issue which need not occupy us here, though interested readers should consult Peacocke (1985), Gendler (2000), Weinberg and Meskin (2006), Kind (2013), Stock (2017), and Arcangeli (2019a, b).

  29. S-imagining, in Peacocke’s parlance (1985: p. 25); F-imagining, in Stock’s (2017).

  30. In (Xhignesse 2020), I argue that such evidence is defeasible and, in fact, typically defeated.

  31. It is worth noting, however, that Yablo clearly thinks that being ignorant of a thing’s impossibility does not do much to explain why someone would or should think that thing possible (1993: p. 36).

  32. I am indebted to Frank Boardman for suggesting Kincaid’s work to me.

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Acknowledgements

Special thanks are due to Emily Robertson, whose perspicacious question about the role of imagination in occurrent versus reflective reading spurred me to write this paper. I hope this goes some way towards answering your question.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Capilano University, Fir 404, 2055 Purcell Way, North Vancouver, BC, V7J 3H5, Canada

    Michel-Antoine Xhignesse

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Special thanks are due to Emily Robertson, whose perspicacious question about the role of imagination in occurrent versus reflective reading spurred me to write this paper. I hope this goes some way towards answering your question.

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Xhignesse, MA. Imagining fictional contradictions. Synthese 199, 3169–3188 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02929-0

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