Derek Matravers has a proposed solution to the problem of imaginative resistance in his paper _Fictional Assent and the (So-Called) “Problem of Imaginative Resistance”_. I need to write this up more carefully in the future, but here’s the rough sketch of his idea.

Some, not all but _some_, fictions follow the report model. To properly appreciate the story, we must imagine that we are receiving a report from a fairly reliable reporter about some land. The analogy is to how we judge reports from a foreign land by a newspaper reporter. With a newspaper reporter, at least a trustworthy one, we believe what they say when they have an epistemologically privileged position. In the fiction, what we accept are the reports with respect to which the reporter has an epistemically privileged position. The idea then is that the reporter has this privilege with respect to non-moral propositions, but not with respect to moral propositions.

I was going to list a number of objections to this as a solution to the puzzles, but it turns out to be hard to individuate them, so I’ll just make a bunch of points.

The overall theme is that this looks like a restatement of the puzzle rather than a solution to it. Why, we might still ask, does the reporter have privilege with respect to non-moral propositions but not moral ones? The only answer I can see in Matravers’s paper is that (a) that’s how we treat real reports from faraway lands, and (b) the report model of understanding fiction tells us to treat this kind of analogy with foreign reporting seriously. But as far as I can tell, (a) simply isn’t true, so this doesn’t help.

In the following two cases I’ve written a wire report and a short story, and I think you’re going to be able to tell the difference.

bq. “BBC”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/somerset/3534361.stm – Weston-super-Mare
Children in a nursery were shocked when they spotted a three-headed frog hopping in their garden.

bq. _The Strange Frog_
Children in the nursery were shocked when they spotted a three-headed frog hopping in their garden.

The news report does go on a little longer, and the story could be spelled out, but I think the idea is clear enough. The natural reaction is to *not* trust the foreign reporter, and trust the fictional reporter. It’s hard to see how the report model could explain this. (Hat tip for BBC story: “Language Log”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000567.html.)

For a more dramatic example, compare the following two.

bq. *Earth Under Attack*
When the attack started, the President was two light years away on a campaign trip. But he rushed back to Earth in seven minutes to lead the military response.

bq. _Earth Under Attack_
When the attack started, the President was two light years away on a campaign trip. But he rushed back to Earth in seven minutes to lead the military response.

I trust the fictional reporter, but not the foreign correspondent. This is a fact that needs explaining, and I can’t see anything in Matravers theory that explains it. There is a discussion of how we can end up trusting fictional reporters who assert impossibilities, which one might think generalises. The main point is that impossibilities need to be set up, and the setting up, appeals to Gods or magic or the like, usually establishes the reporter’s privilege. But my stories have no such setup, and yet we accept the privilege.

I’m also not sure how the report model is meant to handle stories that include among their characters real people, but who in the fiction act somewhat differently to how they acted in real life. An expert on those real people, say a biographer or maybe even the person themselves, should for the purposes of the story accept the fictional reporter as being privileged. But they would not take any real person as being privileged.

This all feels like it’s missing the point, that there is some notion of what it is for a fictional narrator to be privileged that is relevant. And I’m prepared to believe there is such a notion. But it hasn’t been given to us yet, for the version we have got doesn’t explain why the fictional narrator gets trusted about the three-headed frogs but the BBC narrator does not. Moreover, the explanation must explain why these fictional reporters can be trusted when they insist they are in counternomic worlds, but not countermoral worlds. And I don’t see the explanation for that.

I also think this doesn’t work as an account of why there can be imaginative resistance in stories not following the report model. In a movie we pretty clearly aren’t seeing a report, but there can still be imaginative resistance to the intended moral message. So at best this could be a partial solution, and in reality I don’t think it manages to distinguish simple counternomic fictions from simple countermoral ones, which is one of the core things a solution to the puzzle has to do.