I finally got around to reading “John Holbo’s”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/03/fair_is_foul_an.html imaginative resistance piece carefully, well carefully-ish, and it’s given me a lot to think about. I hope we see the remaining sections at some stage, and I certainly hope the tensions of having one foot in analytic philosophy and one foot in cultural studies don’t get unbearable. We who stay put on one side of the fence could certainly do with a broader point of view, from time to time.
Let me state a few points on which I think I agree with John.
* The writing in the examples I’ve been making up isn’t really that good. Well, except for the “Quixote example”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/001665.html, which I still think is side-splittingly funny.
* There are a ton of different problems around the topic of imaginative resistance, and it isn’t obvious we have sorted them all out yet.
* Nor is it obvious that ignoring the aesthetic issues and hoping they’ll sort themselves out, as I basically do, is legitimate.
* The hokey little examples I (and others) provide don’t prove that morally deviant fictions are impossible, just that they take a bit more work than descriptively deviant fictions to draw.
Some days I’m tempted by a point that I took away from a conversation with George Wilson. (I don’t know if George would endorse anything quite this strong so I won’t attribute it to him, but his suggestions got me thinking this way.) There aren’t any interesting rules on what you can and can’t do in fictions. There are just defeasible principles that, as soon as they are made explicit, some author will try to subvert. And, if she’s talented, she’ll succeed in subverting it. This isn’t to say there’s no puzzle about morality in fiction, because we can still ask why there is such a strong, if defeasible, principle against moral deviance. I don’t think I ultimately believe this line, I think the ban on asymmetric compound impossibilities might be absolute, but I certainly assign much higher credence to that kind of position than I did a few months ago.
But I don’t think the hokeyness (or worse) of the writing in my examples is as much of the story as John does. Consider this passage of John’s, commenting on _Pie_.
bq. Weatherson distinguishes between alethic puzzles regarding stories like this i.e. puzzles about whether sentences like the final sentence of Pie can be true and aesthetic puzzles i.e. puzzles about why we dont think offerings like Pie are great literary achievements. Weatherson says he sets the aesthetic puzzle aside. Likewise, Gendler hastily brushes aside niceties of literary interpretation at one point in her paper. But it is far from clear to me that our reaction to Pie (and to similar examples concocted by Gendler and Walton) are anything but literary reactions, i.e. aesthetic ones. I rather suspect that literary niceties are close to being alpha and omega hereabouts. We do not see the sense of stipulating that it was right to throw the pie.
Without wanting to sound too much like a theorist or something, I wonder why John used the word ‘stipulating’ there. If you talked about other things I did in the story, making it fictional that the pie thrower was young (and in some versions dashingly handsome), or that the audience was amused, I don’t think you’d say I stipulated those things. It’s not that it would be wrong to say I stipulated them, it just wouldn’t be the first word that springs to mind.
Which is to say, if the story isn’t very good (and of course it isn’t) then it isn’t very good through and through. The sentences about the youth of the thrower or the amusement of the audience aren’t very good either. Particularly in the first case, we may not see the sense in them. But we aren’t inclined to regard those things as mere stipulations that the author does not really succeed in making fictional.
Now this all consistent with the literary merit or lack thereof being crucial. But I don’t think it’s consistent with it being the ‘alpha and omega’, because we still need to explain why authors can get away with some things in lousy stories (make the pie-thrower young) and not others (make him virtuous).
Of course you might think that the representational properties of lousy stories is not the most exciting topic in the world. And if your primary interest is in fiction itself, that would be a reasonable response. And, to be honest, my interest in the puzzle is _largely_ as a puzzle about fiction. So if it’s just a puzzle about lousy stories, that makes it less interesting than it appears.
But that’s not the only interest in the puzzle. After all, it’s meant, at least in my telling, to show us something about philosophical thought experiments. And philosophical thought experiments are, at least a lot of the time, lousy stories. From time to time I care about the aesthetic qualities of my thought experiments, but usually even when I try I’m just playing for cheap laughs or insanely complicated word games. (Both of those are on display in my “Dr Evil paper”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/evil.pdf. Though to be honest that paper does attempt to make a serious stylistic point, namely that interior monologue can be an incredibly _efficient_ way to tell a philosophical story.) _Qua_ analytic philosophers we have an interest in what happens when the literary stakes are low, even if we don’t have a similar interest _qua_ appreciators of fiction, or aestheticians, or literary theorists.
I promised a simple statement of something in the title, so let me try delivering on that. Here are four tasks you can try at home.
# Imagine things were descriptively, but not normatively, different from the way they actually are.
# Tell a story in which things are descriptively, but not normatively, different from the way they actually are.
# Imagine things were normatively, but not descriptively, different from the way they actually are.
# Tell a story in which things are normatively, but not descriptively, different from the way they actually are.
I think 1 and 2 are dead easy. I can imagine my mouse being an inch right of where it actually is, and that makes no moral difference. Given I can imagine that, 2 is easy as well, though since the relevant story is just about the location of my mouse, it will make _Pie_ look like a Booker-prize winner.
Maybe I’m missing the point of the marble bust analogy, but I think, despite what John promises, 3 is impossible and the odds against 4 are I think very high. Note that I don’t ask for a story in which the fundamental moral principles are different. I might bet against that at even money, but I wouldn’t be shocked if exploiting conventions about genre lets you change fundamental moral facts. I ask for a story in which everything is just as it is, but the moral facts are different. If this is to work, either it will have to involve a very persuasive stipulator, or incredibly clever use of _stylistic_ conventions in order to create a deviant moral setting. And I just don’t see it happening. Any way I imagine changing the fundamental moral principles involves telling a fantastic descriptive story, and using appropriate conventions to do a lot of the work. Such a story would be interesting no doubt; it would refute some of the things I’ve said on TAR over the years, and some things that I’m sure many people believe. But it wouldn’t satisfy 4.
As the rather arrogant appeal to betting odds shows, I don’t have an argument that 4 is impossible. But if it is, no matter what the literary quality of the work, there’s an asymmetry between 2 and 4 that needs (or perhaps wants) explanation. And there’s an asymmetry between 1 and 3 that needs (or perhaps would not wholly object to) explanation. Of course I think I have something like the right explanation, so I would be a little underwhelmed to find there wasn’t anything there to explain!