No philosophy papers blog today because there were no new papers to report. Again. Greg Restall moved one of his papers from to be published to published, which is mostly relevant I guess if you think anything on dead trees is out of date. (A mistaken view, in this particular case at least.)

Via Atrios, this is a disturbing story of attacks on the home of a Houston woman who committed the shameful crime of being French. At the end of the story there was a mention of a proposal to change the name of the French Quarter in New Orleans. But it already is the liberty quarter, or at least libertine.

Jonathan Bennett’s book on conditionals arrived today, so that’s another possible distraction from writing the vagueness book. Too many distractions. (Note the link takes you somewhere where it isn’t yet available. I’m not immediately sure where you can find it online, and I’m too lazy to look it up since, as said, I have the book.)

In the art gallery next door to my office (fond of that phrase) there is a giant sculpture made almost entirely of snack food. The smell is almost as striking as the visual impression. The sculpture is unwatched in the foyer, and as I was coming out of the building I saw someone snacking on some of the jelly beans. It seemed almost appropriate in the circumstances. But maybe I’m just too attached to audience interaction.

Some days I like being at Brown. This afternoon I saw the Department of Theatre’s production of Six Characters in Search of an Author. It only kept rather loosely to the original script of the play, taking self-reference, and non-traditional production values about as far as they can go. The quality and quantity of creative thought that went into the performance were mighty impressive. Apart from the slight misfortune of getting caught in the crossfire of one of the waterpistol fights (it was that kind of production) I had a great time. Given how wild the production was, it was also pretty good news for my thesis that everything that can be represented in fiction can be represented on stage. Or off the stage, if the actors insist on spending half the performance roving the aisles and seats, as they did today.

Anyway, before that I had been trying to hunt down references on Dubliners and truth in fiction, and I couldn’t get into one of the databases from off-campus. So I sent an email to the technicians in charge of those databases about it, thinking it wouldn’t be worked on until tomorrow at the earliest, but already I’ve had some feedback about the problem. I’m sure no other university I’ve spent time at had people doing helpdesk work on the databases Sunday afternoon.

I’m a little surprised at how little critical discussion there is of Dubliners. A quick search on MLA only turned up 31 references to Eveline. It seems I could plausibly make new critical points here as well as philosophical points. I’d have thought Joyce, of all people, would have been done to death by now. Amazingly, most of the critical commentary I found takes Eveline’s comments about Frank at face value, and believes that what he tells Eveline is the truth. None of this sounds remotely plausible to me, but it does suggest that it will be harder to write something about Eveline’s plight than I thought.

From a very brief search, it seems all the examples of unreliable narrators in literature in the literature concern stories told in the first person. This is somewhat odd. Greg Currie corrects the bias a little by discussing unreliable narrators in film, but I think third person narrators who have a clear (and mistaken) point of view are more interesting philosophically.

Having said all that, I looked up Alex Byrne’s 1993 paper on Truth in Fiction, and like the 1999 Phillips paper mentioned below, it also seems immune to the most obvious objections arising out of unreliable narrators. In fact, but for the fact that Byrne’s theory is more carefully developed and motivated, the papers are pretty similar I thought, especially in form but to some extent also in content. And in the fact that both papers suggest that authors can make the moral facts in their stories be whatever they want, which seems false. (In After the Race, Joyce says that the Irish are gratefully oppressed. Assuming this judgement about the true Irish is too harsh, is it true in the story that the Irish are gratefully oppressed?)

Alex’s paper has a nice puzzle, which I’d been looking for a way to frame for a while. Is it true in the Holmes stories that Holmes lives before the age of computer databases? I am inclined to think it is – all the facts about the late 19th century that are not explicitly or implicitly rejected get carried over into the stories, and one of the facts about those decades is that they are before the age of computer databases. Alex says that this should be indeterminate. We could ask a few other similar questions – is Hamlet descended from monkeys, and was his country occupied by Germans in WWII? Again, my intuition is that the answers here are strongly yes and yes. Alex’s theory, and it looks like his intuitions, suggest that these answers are not determinately right. What do you think?

I had an idea to write a paper on truth in fiction arguing that unreliable narrators pose an insuperable problem for extant accounts. The schtick was going to be that every proposal currently on the table gets some fact or other about Eveline wrong, because they all start from the idea that what is in the text is true, and in Eveline this seems unlikely. But maybe this isn’t true. This is the account from John Phillips’s paper Truth and Inference in Fiction (Phil Studies 1999)

A sentence of the form, ‘In the fiction F, p’ is true iff it is reasonable for an informed reader to infer from the text that, under ideal conditions, the author of F would agree that p is part of F.

The problem is that the analysis here is in a sense circular. Idealised beliefs about truth in fiction are used in an account of truth in fiction. So there isn’t enough independent purchase here to let Eveline get a grip on what’s happening.

Having said that, the theory is false, and for a fairly simple reason. (Even circular sounding theories can pick up mistakes as they cycle around the track.) Phillips intends to respect the Principle of Poetic Licence: a writer can make whatever she wants true in her fiction. But as regular readers here will know, that isn’t true. (And I’m not the first one to point it out.) An author can’t make it true, even in a fiction, that selfishness is the greatest of the virtues, no matter how much she tries. And even though one may infer from Rand’s novels that the author would agree that it is part of the story that selfishness is the greatest of the virtues, it is not true in her fiction that this is so. But I’m not sure how to work this into Eveline, unless I can implicate some of Joyce’s somewhat pre-feminist thinking (just why are Eveline and Maria the two most easily confused lead characters in Dubliners?) somehow.

I had an idea to write a paper on truth in fiction arguing that unreliable narrators pose an insuperable problem for extant accounts. The schtick was going to be that every proposal currently on the table gets some fact or other about Eveline wrong, because they all start from the idea that what is in the text is true, and in Eveline this seems unlikely. But maybe this isn’t true. This is the account from John Phillips’s paper Truth and Inference in Fiction (Phil Studies 1999)

A sentence of the form, ‘In the fiction F, p’ is true iff it is reasonable for an informed reader to infer from the text that, under ideal conditions, the author of F would agree that p is part of F.

The problem is that the analysis here is in a sense circular. Idealised beliefs about truth in fiction are used in an account of truth in fiction. So there isn’t enough independent purchase here to let Eveline get a grip on what’s happening.

Having said that, the theory is false, and for a fairly simple reason. (Even circular sounding theories can pick up mistakes as they cycle around the track.) Phillips intends to respect the Principle of Poetic Licence: a writer can make whatever she wants true in her fiction. But as regular readers here will know, that isn’t true. (And I’m not the first one to point it out.) An author can’t make it true, even in a fiction, that selfishness is the greatest of the virtues, no matter how much she tries. And even though one may infer from Rand’s novels that the author would agree that it is part of the story that selfishness is the greatest of the virtues, it is not true in her fiction that this is so. But I’m not sure how to work this into Eveline, unless I can implicate some of Joyce’s somewhat pre-feminist thinking (just why are Eveline and Maria the two most easily confused lead characters in Dubliners?) somehow.

I would like to say the philosophy papers blog is up, but actually there aren’t any new papers to link to. Ted Honderich has a paper in the Independent attacking Tony Blair, to which Chris Bertram has already responded.

I don’t normally mention mentions of papers without links, but I couldn’t help noting that Christopher Green notes on his website the existence of a paper called Psychology Strikes Out: Coleman Griffith and the Chicago Cubs.
I wonder what it could be.

Last night at dinner one of the (many) topics that came up was the quality of titles of philosophical papers. One reason for this was that one of our generous hosts is one of the best in the business at entitling. I feel like I should be writing more about the conversations, since there was lots interesting, but right now all my conversations with my inner editor are something like the following:

–Do you remember when … said … about …

–Should I? Was it worth remembering?

–Yes. Yes.

–Oh. No.

Maybe if I carried around a notepad like a little cub reporter. At one stage I defended the common newspaper practice of treating know as a synonym for truly believes in sentences like 9% of Americans know how many Iraqis were amongst the September 11 hijackers. I thought these cases really are evidence, perhaps not compelling evidence but evidence, for the claim that knowledge just is true belief. Then this morning I see that according to the NY Times, “Half of what doctors know is wrong.”