Fiction as conceptual thought experiment.

Philosophers have long appealed to imagined examples, or conducted thought experiments, to help them reach conceptual conclusions. I argue that works of literary fiction can function like the philosopher's thought experiment and advance our knowledge of folk-psychological concepts of character and emotion. Works of fiction serve this purpose by prompting readers to exercise their concepts in judgments of the fictional characters. To do this, the work of fiction has to raise questions about the characters which put the content or relations of folk-psychological concepts to an interesting test, and the reader must be given sufficient resources for having responses which settle those questions. It is the latter demand which makes literary fiction especially well-suited to this task: grasp and use of emotion and character concepts depends on the capacity to develop a complex, and often affect-laden rapport with the subjects of folk-psychological ascriptions, and a novel or short story can enable us to develop that kind of rapport with its fictional characters. The typical schematic, emotionally unengaging imagined case of the philosopher would not exercise our competence with these concepts. To support this view, I give accounts of conceptual problems raised and resolved in the reading of three works of fiction: Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Proust's Swann's Way, and Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. The latter work, for instance, suggests that dignity requires a form of integrity. Thought-experimental failure is also explored, via examples from George Eliot's Middlemarch, and examples from the philosophical world, such as Kathleen Wilkes' critique of Parfit-style thought experiments. Showing success depends on settling hard questions about precisely what has to be imagined to establish a given possibility and about whether an imagined case is relevant to a given conceptual question.PhDLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsLiteraturePhilosophyPhilosophy, Religion and TheologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129196/2/9409721.pd