Abstract
George Wilson has defended the thesis that even impersonal third-person fictional narratives should be taken to contain fictional narrations and have fictional narrators. This, he argues, is necessary if we are to explain how readers can take themselves, in their imaginative engagement with fictions, to have knowledge of the things they are imagining. I argue that there is at least one class of impersonal third-person fictional narratives—thought experiments—to which Wilson’s model fails to apply, and that this reveals more general problems with his argument. I further argue that there is no good reason to think that Wilson’s account applies more restrictedly to those impersonal third-person fictional narratives that feature in standard works of literary fiction.
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Notes
For a critical survey of the literature on the nature of fiction, see Chap. 3 of my 2007a.
It is interesting to note that philosophical thought experiments often require the reader to imagine something happening either to herself or to the author of the experiment (e.g. Searle’s ‘Chinese Room’, or Parfit’s ‘My Division’). But, again, this is rhetorical in purpose, and the thought experiment would remain intact if formulated in terms of a relatively undeveloped fictional subject. Some philosophical thought experiments are indeed formulated in such terms, for example Putnam’s ‘Twin Earth’ thought experiments.
For a critical overview of work on thought experiments in science, see my 2007b. In the case of perhaps the most famous scientific thought experiment, Galileo’s ‘Tower’ experiment, the thought experiment is presented in the context of a fictional exchange between two characters, Simplicio and Salviati, the former representing the Aristotelean view and the latter representing Galileo himself (Galilei 1989). So it is indeed fictional that someone presents the thought experiment. But there is no obvious need for a fictional narration in Wilson’s sense, since there is no need for us, as readers, to imagine that Salviati intends Simplicio to imagine that he (Salviati) presents the thought experiment as actual, or for us to imagine that Simplicio indeed responds with such an imagining.
On p. 37 of his 1994, Walton considers a story which contains the following sentence: “In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girl.”
References
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Davies, D. Eluding Wilson’s “Elusive Narrators”. Philos Stud 147, 387–394 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9292-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9292-3